A community dedicated to the growing trend of using devices for a singular purpose, rather than relying on (often digital) "do everything" devices, like a smartphone.
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This thing is amazing! I barely used my phone at all in the morning and all through the afternoon as I went about my business. I got sucked in for the evening onwards, but baby steps.
... I'll need to download more music, and get a bigger SD card. I've already played and replayed every single one of them I had loaded onto my Echo Mini these past 2 days.
Those both look great, but sky blue is the right answer.
Reviews on Amazon seem pretty mixed, complaining about the UI and issues crashing (may be resolved by various firmware updates). How has your experience been? Have you used any other DAPs that you could compare to? I'm interested in something for the same reason - to hopefully use my phone less.
This is my first DAP actually, but the sound quality seems to be pretty good. My ANC Sony Ult Wear headphones wired and off do also sound clearer, more natural and open (no fake sounding bass muddying everything else) with the Pop Eq on the device. Compared to having the headphones connected to my phone via Bluetooth.
There's no crash issues with the current firmware (v2.4.0) I've experienced, the Echo Mini has been dead on predictable in a way no Android phone could. However, it would load larger album images rather slowly, which would affect the wake up speed. There are tips out there about lowering the resolution of the album art to compensate, but I haven't done that just yet.
There are preset EQs you can select on it, as well as a custom fixed frequency slider EQ that you can tune to your liking. The base acoustics is a bit lacking on the low end, making it sound a tad bit flat there, but the Pop EQ option did fix that for me. Due to the simplicity of the cpu however, EQ only works for "Standard Quality" 16 bit depth FLAC, not for 24 bit if you are going for lossless.
Do note that I have only loaded up a 16GB SD card with mostly FLAC files, when they are 16 bit depth, so I haven't quite stressed it the same way some users have. I do know that it has a song limit of 8192, so do take that into account.
The battery is very good, a single charge has lasted me a whole day of listening with 2/4 bars left when I got home.
It can also function as a DAC if plugged into a phone/computer via the USB C port, but I haven't had the chance to try that out yet.
I have gone with all FLAC too, but since failing the ABX test miserably I might switch to 320K MP3. It seems I cant tell the difference (on Bluetooth headphones, anyway). https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
That was a fun article! I played the comparison game a few times.
It was an eye opener for me :) How did it go for you ?
some time ago I realized just listening to mp3 vs flac that even in a blind test I couldn't tell anymore. sucks getting old, but, sure means less music storage space with lame v0 or 320...
The smaller files do make life a lot easier.
I'm a classically trained musician and I was a bit of a virtuoso, so I'm trained to hear those differences. Even then, I liked the higher ratio MP3 format, the wav had too much hiss or echo for my liking. I did well on the test, apart from the Katy Perry track, it's so overproduced! Multiple layers of her own voice, honestly that sounded best in lowest quality, lol.
That is really interesting. Thanks. I did worst on very compressed tracks like that exact same one. The exercise has put me off that kind of music even more :)
Really helpful information... I may have to look into one. Thanks for posting and sharing!
Here's an update. The DAC works wonders, though it doesn't apply any eq that you've set beforehand (for now). In other news, I found out I was compensating for bad mixing of certain songs with the Pop EQ. I am now back to no EQ.
I mean, I only connected my phone to the Mini to demo some new bandcamp music, and I was completely blown away by how open and large the instrument separation was. I thought the amazingness was due to Dolby atmos (it was off) or the phone's equalizer (it was also off) or even my headphones' DSP (my headphones was also off). It was none of that. I was simply getting it worse with the increased bass level of the EQ. The Ult Wear just muddies all the mids when the bass is out too strong, no matter where that tuning is coming from I've learned.
Tl;dr: this is an amazing device in terms of audio fidelity, with some understandable limitations that doesn't detract from it's wonderful audio quality. Sony's sound engineers should be ashamed for pushing the Ult in a direction it's not meant to be taking (lots of bass literally blowing everything else away). I think I now know why the Ult button is there, it's not a feature, it's a compromise.