Old phones as streaming sources


   I'm curious how many  of you have converted old phones to streamers. I have found  that when I remove the sim card and shut off blue tooth and wire the phone to a dac with an appropriate USB adapter cable, my old iphone 6s makes a pretty good streamer. Just wondering what others experiance has been. It is a really economical way to source digital to a 2nd or 3rd system. You can even cut electronic noise further by running on battery power when listening and shutting off the screen once the music is rolling. Going one step further would be to transfer local files to the phones memory and turn off wireless altogether. I have not done this but theoretically it should help. I usually just run the Qobuz app and stream from that to my Chord Mojo. What's your experiance?

 

Ag insider logo xs@2xbruce19

I have an S21 with half a terabyte of memory and I put most of my CD's in it as WAV files. Plug that into a Mojo and headphones into that and it makes for a nice little setup.  Sometimes I use it in the car system.

In other words it does not appear to me that there are strong technical reasons that a modest streamer such as a phone can't produce good audio if run through a quality dac...and that is what my ears have been telling me.

@bruce19  Do tell, what other streamers have you compared to the iPhone?  Frankly, with your self-professed very compromised hearing your credibility on this topic is pretty low from my perspective.

Hey @soix unlike some others on this forum I don't hold myself out as a self-annointed expert. I am merely a thinking human who likes audio gear and music. That exactly why I share my limitations. Younger folks may hear things quite differently, but ironicaly from what I can tell, they mostly are happy with much more modest gear. How old are you and how is your hearing?

As for streamers I own or have owned they would include a Pi, an Auralic Aries, a Yamaha WXC-50, and an OktoResearch Dac8 and of course a couple of computers and iphones. Think I mentioned some of these earlier in the thread.

 

Hey @soix unlike some others on this forum I don't hold myself out as a self-annointed expert.

I’m not a self-anointed expert, but it’s pretty clear if you listen to people here who have better streamers from the likes of Aurender, Grimm, Innuos, etc. that streamers matter and the iPhone is not a great streamer — in fact it pretty much sucks IME.  It’s functional but so is a Toyota Corolla — doesn’t make it a great car.  The iPhone is a functional streamer and trying to elevate it past that is just silly talk.  You can’t hear past 11kHz so not surprised you can’t hear the difference, but that’s you and not most of us.  

I don’t know. but it seems to me that in order to be so definitive about a position, it would seem incumbent on the person arguing that position to cite something other than “people who have better streamers”, particularly in light of the science and measurements of some credible audio professionals that support the OP’s position.  And I commend the OP for his much more humble approach here, and for acknowledging out loud what virtually every male over 50 years of age - most of us on this forum lol! - are experiencing.  Michael Fremer did a rather courageous review a couple years ago of hearing aids.