Old phones as streaming sources

Better off using an old smart phone for a dedicated wireless control of a designed "streamer.'

It just needs to be on the same network.

@bruce19 you recruited a lot of single samples united by a culture of expectation bias x rejection of scientific process. 
There are ways to tell if an iPhone is an audibly inferior streamer. No one who responded has done the required steps to make the aforementioned claims of inferiority, so far as this thread reads. That would require an understanding of experimental design, basic statistics, and a fair amount of time/effort.

I totally understand buyers not being down for doing that! What I tend to scratch my head over is how some folks pay manufacturers (who avoid said due diligence) so much for devices that aren’t verifiably (audibly) different. To each their own.

I just use the old phone as the remote for a headless streamer. Personal preference based on nothing pretending to be a meaningful, broadly applicable test 😉

What I tend to scratch my head over is how some folks pay manufacturers (who avoid said due diligence) so much for devices that aren’t verifiably (audibly) different.

@benanders  Speak for yourself.  Plenty of us have heard big improvements moving up to streamers from Aurender, Innuos, etc.  Maybe it’s time you tried something better than your Raspberry Pi and see/hear for yourself. 

'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.'

Good on you mate. My experience is yours. I'm using my 2 old Samsung S3 including a Cambridge XS and a Violectric Chronos DAC for on the fly listening. I am listening as well with the Samsung Galaxys Tab S 2, in this case going into integrated amps with USB 2.0. For this, I have a (now very hard to find) docking station where I connect the USB A-B cable.

In addition, I have downloaded the USB Audio Player Pro app, running all locally stored music files and Quobuz. You would pay a small amount for the USB Player Pro app and you can use it for all your android gear, paying only once. It is this app which makes a big difference, IMO.

To my ears and in my system and listening environement, the above solution is more than decent and inexpensive.

For iOS, instead of USB Audio Player Pro it could be the TEAC HR Audio Player app.

soix

8,136 posts

02-05-2024 at 02:25pm 

“What I tend to scratch my head over is how some folks pay manufacturers (who avoid said due diligence) so much for devices that aren’t verifiably (audibly) different.”

@benanders  Speak for yourself.  Plenty of us have heard big improvements moving up to streamers from Aurender, Innuos, etc.  Maybe it’s time you tried something better than your Raspberry Pi and see/hear for yourself. 
 

@soix thats a fair suggestion. Indeed, I do speak for myself bc I don’t stipulate that the absence of [real] evidence (for streamers performing audibly differently) is evidence of absence. No indeed. Such difference may well be real, absolutely, despite how unlikely. Generally persons with concern for scientific rigor or at least a reasonable amount of prior training will speak for themselves, and I tend to remember and do just that. Insistence that something is different, let alone invariably poor, because I perceived variation in a subjective, bias-prone comparison was in your reply to this thread, not mine. 😃

Funny thing: I had some folks cycle their high-end DAC’s and streamers through my system for the fun of it. Really more for the owners’ fun - they were curious to hear snazzy source kit on speakers that out-scaled their own. They are mostly the forever high-end kit-swapping type (surely nothing inherently wrong with that interest - just a less precise, more expensive way of using DSP, IMO), so they have plenty of experience pulling out and reinserting banana plugs; I was perfectly comfortable letting them cycle through stuff while I turned my back. I didn’t want to know which device was in the chain as they sang played the A/B/C’s.
 

I couldn’t perceive any difference past what timing / repeated listening alone could have accounted for. On any of those fun occasions. And even in that I was still violating every expectation of a meaningfully done blind test setup. Who cares, it was just for fun. But aureckon Aurender and similar just haven’t helped me see day vs. night predictably. Kit-swapping (or pretending to) does make for difference in sound, absolutely, I just can’t do it in a way that aligns it with being due to kit in the chain. Also - each time, those devices were personal units, not sales floor units, so they didn’t likely need breaking in if that were to account for my inability.

I tend to think the more likely culprit is that I have realistic expectation and confidence in what I can hear among digital data transfers vs. folks who might be happy to inform me how untrained my listening is.

IMO. 😉