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?
World class performance? Really??? I think not, but you believe what u wanna believe. Your iPhone6s is streaming shite no matter how good you think it might be. But u be u. Peace out. |
I recently switched from Android to an iPhone but there is one streaming app that doesn’t run well in Macland so I did the exact thing the OP mentioned when I listen to this service. It works well. The caveat is the app is for Pristine Classical, a label the specializes in digital restoration of old classical recordings, some of which are a century old. The digital restorations are amazing, and I have compared the android phone as a player to some of the same recordings that were downloaded to my server and played via my CA streamer and can detect no difference; however despite the quality of the restoration work they are perhaps not the best recordings to make sweeping generalizations from |
@fuzztone It needs to be noted that a Pi is not a "single purpose" built device. It was conceived and built as a small computer that would be a teaching tool to get young folks interested in computers and programming. They are frequently used as a very affordable around computer. In contrast the electronics in an iphone are much more sophisticated, but that is why for our purposes it might be worthwhile to shut down most of the unnecessary functions. I go back to the beauty of the battery power since in much of our hifi world it is the quality of the power supply that is the foundation of audio fidelity, and you just can't do much better than a battery. The extreme energy efficiency and nano scale design elements of todays phones permit tiny batteries. @soix referenced an Ifi Zen streamer. I have not heard one, but have read good things about them and he attests to this. I don't know for sure but based on the reasonable price of the Zen streamer I wouldn't be surprised if it is not based on the Pi or some small computer very similar. The further refinement comes from the power supply and the handling of the digital output, as I understand it. |
