[HiFiChris]

Can anybody check whether the "adapter" works with an iPod Nano 7G?

 

[exiton]

I happened to be in an Apple Store today and bought the dongle. Two members of staff confirmed that it would work with the 6S. Nope. "This accessory is not supported by this device.".

You've got to be on iOS 10

 

[elfary]

No iOS 10 no dice.

 

[krismusic]

You've got to be on iOS 10

Ah! Nice one. Thanks for that.

 

[sikki-six]

I happened to be in an Apple Store today and bought the dongle. Two members of staff confirmed that it would work with the 6S. Nope. "This accessory is not supported by this device.".

Have you updated to iOS10? The text you quoted pointed out it's not gonna work if not.

Daymn, too late

 

[krismusic]

Yep. Updated and now working. Sounds nice. Probably placebo! So I don't understand. I didn't think there was an audio pathway out of lighting. So is the amp routed but not the DAC? I don't suppose anyone knows if the DAC in the dongle is the same as the old 30 pin to Lightning cable?

 

[elfary]

I'd call placebo to the Dragonfly LOL.


If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

 

[krismusic]

I'd call placebo to the Dragonfly LOL.

If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

If that's directed at me, I'm not using a Dragonfly. Or did you mean dongle? If so I would tend to agree. Although I'm using the K10 multi BA. Maybe the difference in impedance between HO and dongle suits them better?
I'm liking IOS10 on my 6S though.

 

[elfary]

I was just kidding. My comment was aimed at no one i particular. Just a way to express how much i am liking the dongle.




If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

 

[krismusic]

I was just kidding. My comment was aimed at no one i particular. Just a way to express how much i am liking the dongle.




If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

You reckon it really is an improvement?

 

[elfary]

I was just kidding. My comment was aimed at no one i particular. Just a way to express how much i am liking the dongle.




If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

You reckon it really is an improvement?

For crazy balanced armatures yes. The dongle Zout is a Godsend and something never attained while the audio circuitry was inside the phone.

On the other hand i would not tout the dongle as built to last.

I am having the..err courage to keep my iphone 6 on iOS 9.3.5 so i am doing the trials on borrowed iPhones but i am liking more and more what i hear so at any moment i will give in and put iOS 10 in my japanese iPhone 6.



If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

 

[krismusic]

For crazy balanced armatures yes. The dongle Zout is a Godsend and something never attained while the audio circuitry was inside the phone.

On the other hand i would not tout the dongle as built to last.

I am having the..err courage to keep my iphone 6 on iOS 9.3.5 so i am doing the trials on borrowed iPhones but i am liking more and more what i hear so at any moment i will give in and put iOS 10 in my japanese iPhone 6.



If the tonality it's not right, then nothing else really matters.

There are some nice bells and whistles in 10.

 

[yuriv]

   
Thanks a lot for all the objective information you share with the community. Much appreciated and useful to avoid snakoil.
 
I would be curious about an RMAA of the dongle driving a real earphone vs the iPhone 6s hpo driving that same headphone to catch a glimpse of THD, IMD and crosstalk in a real world scenario. It would be amazing if Cirrus Logic had been able squeeze a good crosstalk performance in such a tiny enclosure.
 
In the added graph i noticed that the SMPTE IMD was noticeably higher in the dongle. What would be the impact of this in subjective listening versus iPad Pro or iPhone 6s ?
 
Today I have done more listening with the Shure SE846 and the Westone W30 plugged to the combo dongle-iPhone 6s Plus and the sound is pretty darn good to these ears: clean and linear to boot. The dongle feels like an engineering statement from Apple.
 
FTR in a quiet room i have been utterly unable of hearing any emi noise bleeding into the dongle (attached to the iPhone 6s Plus).
 
last but not least: the dongle will only work in iOS 10 running devices. So not suitable for any iPod other than the latest Touch.

 
When I have time later on, maybe I'll test it with some real earphones. But that's what the 16 ohm load is supposed to simulate. The typical dynamic-driver IEM looks like a 16-ohm resistor with maybe a wrinkle around 2 kHz. iOS devices usually run into clipping with these low-impedance loads at maximum volume. But at 1 click below that, the distortion is pretty low. That's more than enough power for almost all of these kinds of earphones--even the Etymotic ER4S, which has a 75-ohm series resistor already built in. For higher impedance loads (like that Ety 4S), you can go to maximum volume on these things and they won't distort. The only limitation is the voltage, which tops out at 1V. On measurements with something like an HD600 attached, the numbers look like the ones for no load.
 
I'll have to double check that SMPTE IMD test. I created the test file myself in Audacity then imported it to a .wav file. For some reason, the dongle doesn't handle it as well as the headphone out on the iPhone 6S or the iPad Pro. The same test in RMAA didn't reveal that much worse performance:
 

SMPTE IMD
 
I suspected increased jitter, so I zoomed in at 7 kHz:
 

Detail at 7 kHz
 
Aha! Even RMAA on a MacBook Pro is sensitive enough to reveal it. The base of the spike starts widening at -100 dB down for the dongle. The iPad and the iPhone don't have it. This can be caused by random jitter. But at around 100 dB below the level of the signal, I doubt it would have any audible effect. I'll have to find where I put that J-test file. Also, keep in mind that this is at maximum volume. At the typical listening level, these artifacts are probably buried under the noise floor. But I can just hear now it from the crowd: "Oooh, what I heard was definitely jitter!". Lol.
 
The "skirt" at the base of the spike can also be seen in the 1kHz THD+N graph from the same RMAA measurement set:
 

Left: 1 kHz sine at maximum volume
Right: detail
 
 
In any case, these small things didn't prevent you from enjoying the music. I hope you don't let them psych you into hearing phantom jitter artifacts. Lol. Anyway, it's a give and take as far the performance goes, but the improvements in the Lightning adapter are where they are most audible: the less noticeable noise (vs the iPhone 6S), and the guaranteed flat frequency response thanks to the near-zero output impedance.
 
I'll give an update in a later post if anything interesting comes up.

 

[elfary]

   
When I have time later on, maybe I'll test it with some real earphones. But that's what the 16 ohm load is supposed to simulate. The typical dynamic-driver IEM looks like a 16-ohm resistor with maybe a wrinkle around 2 kHz. iOS devices usually run into clipping with these low-impedance loads at maximum volume. But at 1 click below that, the distortion is pretty low. That's more than enough power for almost all of these kinds of earphones--even the Etymotic ER4S, which has a 75-ohm series resistor already built in. For higher impedance loads (like that Ety 4S), you can go to maximum volume on these things and they won't distort. The only limitation is the voltage, which tops out at 1V. On measurements with something like an HD600 attached, the numbers look like the ones for no load.
 
I'll have to double check that SMPTE IMD test. I created the test file myself in Audacity then imported it to a .wav file. For some reason, the dongle doesn't handle it as well as the headphone out on the iPhone 6S or the iPad Pro. The same test in RMAA didn't reveal that much worse performance:
 

SMPTE IMD
 
I suspected increased jitter, so I zoomed in at 7 kHz:
 

Detail at 7 kHz
 
Aha! Even RMAA on a MacBook Pro is sensitive enough to reveal it. The base of the spike starts widening at -100 dB down for the dongle. The iPad and the iPhone don't have it. This can be caused by random jitter. But at around 100 dB below the level of the signal, I doubt it would have any audible effect. I'll have to find where I put that J-test file. Also, keep in mind that this is at maximum volume. At the typical listening level, these artifacts are probably buried under the noise floor. But I can just hear now it from the crowd: "Oooh, what I heard was definitely jitter!". Lol.
 
The "skirt" at the base of the spike can also be seen in the 1kHz THD+N graph from the same RMAA measurement set:
 

Left: 1 kHz sine at maximum volume
Right: detail
 
 
In any case, these small things didn't prevent you from enjoying the music. I hope you don't let them psych you into hearing phantom jitter artifacts. Lol. Anyway, it's a give and take as far the performance goes, but the improvements in the Lightning adapter are where they are most audible: the less noticeable noise (vs the iPhone 6S), and the guaranteed flat frequency response thanks to the near-zero output impedance.
 
I'll give an update in a later post if anything interesting comes up.

 
Thanks a lot for the time and your very solid input Yuriv.
 
If you do compare the SMPTE IMD which an iPod Touch 3rd gen (at NwAvGuy blog) you'll see that the dongle is in the same ballpark which NwAvGuy dubbed -as you- utterly inaudible. I have not heard any hint of jitter or fuzziness really.

Actually, i enjoy a lot the perfect linearity of the dongle's output with my two balanced armature earphones. But i am always trying to learn and correlate numbers with sound.

 

[PetZoundz]

   
When I have time later on, maybe I'll test it with some real earphones. But that's what the 16 ohm load is supposed to simulate. The typical dynamic-driver IEM looks like a 16-ohm resistor with maybe a wrinkle around 2 kHz. iOS devices usually run into clipping with these low-impedance loads at maximum volume. But at 1 click below that, the distortion is pretty low. That's more than enough power for almost all of these kinds of earphones--even the Etymotic ER4S, which has a 75-ohm series resistor already built in. For higher impedance loads (like that Ety 4S), you can go to maximum volume on these things and they won't distort. The only limitation is the voltage, which tops out at 1V. On measurements with something like an HD600 attached, the numbers look like the ones for no load.
 
I'll have to double check that SMPTE IMD test. I created the test file myself in Audacity then imported it to a .wav file. For some reason, the dongle doesn't handle it as well as the headphone out on the iPhone 6S or the iPad Pro. The same test in RMAA didn't reveal that much worse performance:
 

SMPTE IMD
 
I suspected increased jitter, so I zoomed in at 7 kHz:
 

Detail at 7 kHz
 
Aha! Even RMAA on a MacBook Pro is sensitive enough to reveal it. The base of the spike starts widening at -100 dB down for the dongle. The iPad and the iPhone don't have it. This can be caused by random jitter. But at around 100 dB below the level of the signal, I doubt it would have any audible effect. I'll have to find where I put that J-test file. Also, keep in mind that this is at maximum volume. At the typical listening level, these artifacts are probably buried under the noise floor. But I can just hear now it from the crowd: "Oooh, what I heard was definitely jitter!". Lol.
 
The "skirt" at the base of the spike can also be seen in the 1kHz THD+N graph from the same RMAA measurement set:
 

Left: 1 kHz sine at maximum volume
Right: detail
 
 
In any case, these small things didn't prevent you from enjoying the music. I hope you don't let them psych you into hearing phantom jitter artifacts. Lol. Anyway, it's a give and take as far the performance goes, but the improvements in the Lightning adapter are where they are most audible: the less noticeable noise (vs the iPhone 6S), and the guaranteed flat frequency response thanks to the near-zero output impedance.
 
I'll give an update in a later post if anything interesting comes up.

Very nicely written. Quick question for you, when attaching a 3.5mm cable to the dongle to plug into, say, a car's AUX input, would you leave the phone volume on max, or a click below?