[Galeonero]

Hello people, I hope you are all very well in these difficult times.

I had for about a year the Shanling UP2 that incorporates the DAC ES9218P and decided to sell it recently for various reasons such as interference in the Bluetooth connection but mainly for the sound, I honestly did not feel a huge difference against the sound that my Xiaomi Redmi Note7 smartphone gave me which is a mid-range for less than 200 dollars. I felt more than anything a presence more bass than the other frequencies, so I decided to sell it because it does not seem justifiable to spend 70 dollars on a device that has more bass and more power that I do not need. Clarify that i test them with the FiiO F9 PRO headphones.

So I would like to buy a DAC / AMP (approximately $ 200 budget) that has a better sound than the DAC ES9218P, but that is a good difference and feels that it is worth that money.I don't want it to be bluetooth, it doesn't matter if it is desktop, portable or DAP.
I was also looking into the FiiO Q1 Mark II and the FiiO M6, many people's comments were that they really don't notice a justifiable difference against their smartphones that are not dedicated to audio.

And here comes my question, really the DAC ES9218P is a DAC barely superior to that of smartphones or I am expecting a super sound that does not exist, because the reality is that in the most expensive devices it is not that it sounds "better" if not that sounds more faithful to how it was recorded, as if you were there listening live.

I hope my question has been understood, thank you very much to those who answer me.

 

[HipHopScribe]

You were probably expecting too much. The headphone output on most modern smartphones that still have one is gonna be reasonably clean. Distortion and crosstalk are probably higher than even a cheap external DAC/amp, but just because it measures better doesn't mean all of that difference is gonna be audible to you. Power is gonna be lower, but you're using highly efficient earphones, not full-size headphones that crave power, so you don't need higher output. Bluetooth throws another wrinkle in with this case though, because that means your music is being re-encoded, which probably doesn't make a big difference but could handicap the UP2 a little bit.

 

[Galeonero]

You were probably expecting too much. The headphone output on most modern smartphones that still have one is gonna be reasonably clean. Distortion and crosstalk are probably higher than even a cheap external DAC/amp, but just because it measures better doesn't mean all of that difference is gonna be audible to you. Power is gonna be lower, but you're using highly efficient earphones, not full-size headphones that crave power, so you don't need higher output. Bluetooth throws another wrinkle in with this case though, because that means your music is being re-encoded, which probably doesn't make a big difference but could handicap the UP2 a little bit.

So do you think that if I would use, for example, the Shanling m0 that has the same DAC, it would listen better than its bluetooth version? Is that bluetooth compression difference very audible?

 

[HipHopScribe]

Bluetooth compression is technically lossy, so it's possible it's audible to you. I think LDAC is pretty transparent personally. I don't think there's a huge different anyway.

Also, the same device with the same DAC chip can still sound different depending on the implementation, even outside of the wired vs wireless issue, so it's hard to say if the M0 would sound better without comparing them side by side