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?
@lanx0003 Sure it can. I’ll mention that power supplies consistently are reported to have a significant impact on the sound of a streamer, and I never listened to my ZS without the iPowerX so I suppose that could account for at least some of the differences we heard although there are obviously numerous other variables involved.
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@lanx0003 Well I'm open to the notion that it could all be fictitious. Personal experiance suggests there ARE differences between streamers BUT I have never been "blown away" by those differences as some profess to have been. My experiance with subjective listening is that my judgement is clouded by all kinds of influences. I like it when measurement backstops perception and vice versa, but we don't get that all the time in this hobby. And then there is the vexing question when listening subjectively whether different=better. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. I like the term that I think Archimago used somewhere in his blog arguing that some of us a Euphonophiles, meaning we like the sound what we like, not necessarily the most faithful reproduction. I think that is true. Me, I try to have it both ways. I have some equipment that leans toward accuracy and others that produce very pleasing distortion. Both are ok. |
you should check out streamer reviews on hifi news.paul miller does a measurements section at the end of each. in some cases, he shows the inferred jitter and snr of the streamer, and the impact on different dacs. cross walking that to the archimago piece, you might be able to compare cheap streamers to more expensive ones. |
@mdalton Thanks. Was not aware of hifi news. The really do have a who’s who of high end streamer tests! So lets assume that frequency and noise floor are pretty much settled issues with differences that are pretty much below the human level of detection in any competently designed streamer (at least that’s my opinion), and focus on jitter which seems very likely to be able to impair things like coherency, image and sound-stage. so here is the chart for the Grimm mu1, a very nice $10,000 streamer, Grimm Mu1
and here is the similar chart for the four "working class" streaming sources in the Archimago blog article, Working Class streamers
Taken at face value the "working class" group seems to surpass the aristocrat.(for the benefit of anyone reading this I looked at the measurements of several aristocrats on the HIFI site and their measurements were strikingly similar) Now I know enough about testing and charts to know there are variables that may not have been equal in the setup and testing from these two different sources so I would not say that this is a rock solid conclusion, but at the least it does argue that there is not much difference insofar as this measurement relates to perceived sound quality. |
Jitter in audio or video streams is indeed measured in milliseconds (ms), representing the variation in the time it takes for data to travel from the source to the destination. The acceptable level of jitter before causing distortion can vary depending on the specific application and standards, with some says 30 ms. How would the aforementioned Jittle test measured in dB be translated to time delay? thx. |
