[starfly]

Does anyone know of a front-end that will allow proper usage of a DAC with Spotify in Android? For example, with USB Audio Player Pro (UAPP), you can connect to Tidal and Qobuz and stream through UAPP while properly utilizing your DAC.

I think when I play straight from the Spotify app it just upsamples everything which isn't ideal. Don't even care about the lossy compression, but I think Spotify just has most of the music I like and their recommendation engine is second to none. Tidal and Qobuz don't even come close.

 

[Nevzatt]

Starfly, in fact, I am trying find out the same. Theoritically, by unlocking developer option in Android, it will allow you to change USB setting and set USB as audio source. This means that Spotify can directly stream into the DAC via USB however I haven't tested that option yet.

 

[starfly]

Starfly, in fact, I am trying find out the same. Theoritically, by unlocking developer option in Android, it will allow you to change USB setting and set USB as audio source. This means that Spotify can directly stream into the DAC via USB however I haven't tested that option yet.

Yes, to be clear, you can at anytime have spotify play through a connected USB dac (though it depends on your Android implementation, Samsung phones do it without issue). And I can do that right now without problem.

The issue is that when playing through the Android system, everything gets up sampled to 48khz first and then gets passed to the DAC I believe. To prevent that you need something like UAPP with its own usb driver implementation. And that's really what I'm looking for, as up sampling can create artifacts.

Im tempted to switch to Tidal streaming just because of that, as you can stream Tidal through UAPP and playback will be bit perfect (yes even with lossy codecs it should still be better). Am on a 1 month trial with tidal now and they do have something of a recommendations engine now which doesn't appear to be too bad. Just sucks they're very heavily hiphop focused, a genre I don't listen that much to, but they have a better catalog than Qobuz for my taste (electronic music (non-edm))

 

[Nevzatt]

Thanks for sharing. I am quite new in this world and trying to decide on my first gear set. I am looking for to use Spotify as my source to drive CCA C10 first and later on adding TempoTec Sonata iDSD DAC. Probably I can switch to Tidal later on but I do also listen electronic music too. Do you see any challenge with this approach?

 

[starfly]

Thanks for sharing. I am quite new in this world and trying to decide on my first gear set. I am looking for to use Spotify as my source to drive CCA C10 first and later on adding TempoTec Sonata iDSD DAC. Probably I can switch to Tidal later on but I do also listen electronic music too. Do you see any challenge with this approach?

Well, I think for electronic music Spotify overall might have a more complete catalog, but Tidal isn't too bad. I imported a 120 song Spotify playlist to Tidal and it only dropped about 10 songs, so not too bad overall. But too soon to draw any conclusions on Spotify vs. Tidal. And Spotify definitely has the better discovery engine, as I keep finding new music in my Discover Weekly playlist. Tidal does have My Mixes with 4 playlists that is kind of like Spotify's Daily Mixes (a combination of songs in your library + recommendations), so am still exploring that to see how good it is.