Android for Audiophiles: COMPLETE Guide

[Music] hi audio nerds and welcome back to the channel it's great to see you all and if you haven't subscribed yet do take a second just to hit that red button below the video thank you now much as i enjoy kicking back to my favorite music playing on my favorite bits of home hi-fi i find being honest most of the listening i do day to day is music played through my smartphone particularly when i'm out and about i suspect many of you use your phone as your primary music player too despite all its shortcomings as a dedicated audio player for a start most modern smartphones particularly the premium end of the market don't even have 3.5 mil headphone jacks so i thought i would do a couple of videos on how to maximize the audio file experience from your smartphone the situation is a little bit different depending on whether you use an iphone or an android like the one i've got here there are differences both in terms of audio hardware and software and even the kind of quality you can get over bluetooth so today we're going to focus on android but don't worry iphone fans there's going to be a companion video on iphone audiophilia coming up soon so first of all we'll look at the hardware options in the android world then we'll look at software to get the best audio experience out of your phone let's just say for now that it's much more complex in android to get bit perfect high quality audio from your phone than it is from the iphone but it isn't impossible as i'm going to show you so stay tuned the best thing about choosing android is that it's still possible to get phones with headphone jacks such as my trusty pixel 4a 5g here which i'm going to use for demonstrating in this video but remember the quality of the music coming out of the audio jack depends on two things first of all you have to take into account the quality of the digital to analog converter or dac inside the phone along with the quality of the headphone amplifier circuitry now most android phones use some variation of a qualcomm chipset or exynos if you're using a samsung phone here in europe for example and the dacs built into these chips are actually reasonably capable however the headphone amplification is often neglected with noisy low power output circuits sometimes prone to interference from the phone's other systems you'd struggle to drive a decent pair of over air cans from the headphone output of most modern android phones the exception to this rule is the lg line of phones particularly the g and v phones from the past three or four years many of these boast dedicated ess sabre dax like you'd find in a dedicated digital audio player and they also feature more powerful internal headphone amps but there's a problem if you haven't heard lg's phones vision is no more it's dead deceased it's not pining for the fjords it's an x phone division so it's probably not a good idea to splurge your cash on a new lg phone but if you can find a cheap secondhand lg v30 or 40 for example in good condition you might do well to snap it up having said all that the output from most phones jacks including this one is actually pretty sufficient to drive a pair of iems and they will sound so much better than the rubbish bundled ear buds that come with your phone something like these the trn ta ones which i'm really loving at the moment watch out for a review of those coming up these cost about 35 to 40 dollars if you've got a little bit more spare cash then these are my current favorite sub 150 pound iems they are of course the wonderful moon drop star field which i've had for over a year now and you can see they're well used you can see the chips on the paint but cosmetic damage aside they sound fantastic but assuming your phone doesn't have a headphone jack like the cool but ultra expensive s21 ultra what do you do then well the default position for many would be to get a pair of bluetooth earbuds now i agree that this isn't a true hi-fi option and bluetooth still absolutely sucks in many regards i might do a video on it at some point if you guys want to see bluetooth audio getting a good kicking just let me know in the comments however there are some good bluetooth options out there that offer convenient listening and some excellent noise cancellation and surprisingly good sound quality so my current top two picks for android bluetooth earbuds are these two first of all we've got the sony wf-1000xm4s these cost 250 pounds so quite a lot really in the uk 279 dollars in the us and these are without doubt the finest sounding bluetooth earbuds that i personally have tried so these are my top choice but if you don't want to spend that kind of money the second recommendation is the samsung galaxy buds pro the latest version of samsung's bluetooth earbuds now these two are quite expensive with a list price of 219 however you often find them on sale for a lot less if not actually just given away with samsung phones but you didn't watch this video to learn about bluetooth headsets because this is an audio file video you will quite rightly still want to use your expensive wired headphones so let's look at the other options if your phone doesn't have a headphone socket so the first option is to get yourself one of these which you'll recognize as being a usbc to 3.5 mil dongle but it's not as simple as that because not all dongles are created equally in android world you see there are passive dongles like this one and active dongles like this one and despite looking very similar they are completely different so what's all that about then well a passive dongle like this basically just passes through an analog signal from the usbc port of your phone to the headphone jack in essence it's like having an external headphone jack with all the audio processing being done by the dac in the phone itself now the difficulty is that not all android phones can output an analog audio signal through the usbc port the phones that can include models from the likes of realme oppo oneplus and xiaomi phones as well i think although don't quote me on that however samsung phones and for example my pixel 4a 5g can't do that so for example if i plug my passive dongle into my pixel phone i will get a message let's have a look at what it says it says analog audio accessory detected the attached device is not compatible with this phone boo hiss so as long as your phone supports analog audio pass through through the usbc port then a passive dongle will be great and then the audio quality will depend as we've already said on the phone's dac and amplification circuitry so the other kind of dongle you can get is an active dongle like this one and this one's very different because it has a tiny little dac and headphone amp housed in the dongle itself so all you need to do is pass through a digital signal through the usbc port and the digital to analog conversion amplification is done by the dongle itself now the good news is that all android phones can pass through a digital uh audio signal through the usb c port so an active dongle will work with any android phone including the pixel and the samsung phones in fact this is the official samsung 3.5 mil adapter and it sounds surprisingly decent coming through a samsung phone samsung adapter can handle high-res audio i think up to 384 kilohertz and 24 bit the other one that's quite good is the apple usbc to headphone adapter but i think that's limited to 48 kilohertz files so dongles certainly are a nice cheap way of upgrading your android audio experience particularly if you've got some nice iems they tend to be cheap they're very easy to carry around but also surprisingly easy to lose i can't tell you how many of these dongles i've lost over the years okay we're leveling up now and if you've got deeper pockets both literally and metaphorically you might want to try a full-size portable dac over a mini dongle they are typically more powerful and just generally sound a lot better so here we have two great examples the audioquest dragonfly red and the fio btr5 now both of these are as you can see about the size of an old school usb stick and they are both ideal for audio files on the go hooking them up to your phone is pretty easy for the dragonfly red which has an old-school usb a connection you need a usbc to usb a adapter this is just a cheap one from anchor which costs i think about four pounds the btr5 on the other hand has a usbc connection so you need a usbc to usbc cable this is the standard charging cable for the pixel i think no this one's the ipad pro in fact and it works really well although it's a bit long you probably want to get yourself a shorter one of these for on-the-go listening now the btr5 has another trick up its sleeve as it's also a bluetooth receiver so you can find music over to it using the ldac codec which is the highest quality bluetooth codec you can currently get for audio the dragonfly on the other hand is a really full-bodied ess saber-powered dac and it has a really powerful amplification stage so it's really good for more demanding full-sized over-ear headphones now the btr-5 has great value at around 90 pounds here in the uk the audioquest dragonfly is a lot more expensive i think it's 169 pounds currently of the two when i'm out and about i tend to prefer the btr5 it's just a more versatile and great value device overall i've done a video on it go check it out if you want the full details and of course you can keep going with larger more powerful external dax so for example you could use something like the ifi hipdac which is a bit too big for me for everyday portable use but it sounds absolutely fantastic packing a huge bassy thump you can even connect the phone over usbc to a home dac such as the ifi zendak v2 which is a great little desktop dac and headphone amp which i've also reviewed recently so that is all the hardware that you can use to upgrade your android audio experience but now let's turn to the peculiarities of the way that android handles audio which is what makes android audio philia a somewhat frustratingly complex experience you see you might have invested in a megabox high-end dac capable of handling 24-bit 192khz files and even mqa for what it's worth but android will merely laugh in your smug face because what it does is it takes any and all audio files and sends it through a re-sampling process in its native audio stack and outputs it at 48 kilohertz yup that's right tidal spotify co buzz deezer amazon hd all those files will be resampled to 48 kilohertz by the android audio stack that in itself is enough to upset some audio files as a playback is that not bit perfect now me personally i'm a pragmatic audiophile and whilst the ocd bit of me does enjoy a bit of bit perfection is that a thing i wouldn't mind if the resampling process didn't actually affect the sound quality but the problem is that it sometimes does audibly so so for example if you listen to the first track on dark side of the moon by pink floyd on some android phones and you turn the volume up you get this nasty hissing and crackling digital noise before the heartbeats kick in once the music signal itself gets louder this noise becomes rather less audible but it certainly ruins quieter passages of classical music particularly if you have got some sensitive iems now this doesn't happen on all phones though so for example on my pixel 4a 5g even through very sensitive iems through the headphone jack i don't get any audible artifacts at all however on another phone i had the lg v30 it really was noticeable when playing non-mqa tracks through the title app for example if you are a bit perfectionist however fear not because there is a solution in the form of this phenomenal app called usb audio player pro or uapp for short now this is available from the google play store it's a paid app it costs 7.99 i bought it years ago basically what it can do is bypass the android audio stack and access either the internal dac or an external usb dac directly and it can therefore play bit perfectly through either the headphone jack or an external dac now it can play files stored on your phone's internal memory or a micro sd card if your phone supports that but the big news here is that it also allows you to log in into either your cobuzz or tidal accounts and play those through the same direct driver the interface as you can see shows you the bitrate that is actually playing so in the case of this muse album here you can see that the original file is 96 kilohertz 24 bit and it's playing it through the internal dac so outputting it through the headphone jack bit perfectly at 96 kilohertz there is an optional mqa decoder add-on which i believe is a paid in-app purchase and it'll perform the so-called first unfold of your mqa file it's widely compatible with a huge range of external dac so for example here i've got the btr5 connected via cable and as you can see the display says usb dac is outputting at 96 kilohertz and sure enough if we check the display 96 kilohertz if i switch over to a cd quality file playing at just 44.1 kilohertz as you can see let's check the dac and it switched 44.1 kilohertz so uapp absolutely fantastic bit of software probably the best eight quid i've spent on an android app it's important to note that uapp is not the only app that can take advantage of this direct access mode to the usb dac if you predominantly listen to offline music then you might want to check out neutron music player which is what i've got here it's a bit less user friendly in my opinion but it does offer lots of opportunity to tweak settings and equalization if that's your thing and the audio quality is also really good it's a paid app and i think it too costs 7.99 or pounds the high b high buy music player is another option that you might want to consider because it is free and it supports title streaming along with offline file playback i must admit that i haven't really used it that much however my brief first impression of it is that it isn't as easy or friendly to use as uapp so that is still my top recommendation for the best audiophile android software so there you have it those are my complete thoughts on the android audio file experience i hope you've enjoyed the video and found it useful if you have then please do leave me a comment below and if you have any further hints or tips or bits of software that you'd like to recommend again just drop a comment below thank you so much for watching stay safe and i'll see you in the next video

Channel: Audio Fixation

Views: 11,748

Rating: 4.9633698 out of 5

Keywords: Audio Fixation, Audio, DAP, DAC, Portable Audio, Android Audio, iPhone Audio, FLAC, Music, Android audiophile, audiophile, UAPP, Neutron Music Player

Id: LgTqnOwfT4M

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 04 2021