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Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

naughtycomputer.uk

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Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#31

Post by frabert »

praptak wrote: post #15

”It improves sound quality by taking away the hard work of driving the dynamic load of the headphones from the device" Can anybody explain that please? What is this dynamic load whose driving is hard?

I'm no EE, but dynamic headphones (i.e. 99.5% of them) have a generally high impedance (relative to earphones) and require a higher voltage to operate. Add to that the fact that they are a mostly inductive load, and you get the recipe for a hard to drive device, that requires a high voltage paired with an strong inductive kickback

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#32

Post by slx26 »

ThJ wrote: post #9
baxtr wrote: post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

This guy is both smart and stupid at the same time.

or smart and annoyed

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#33

Post by ricardobeat »

temp0876456 wrote: post #14

Boy does this person need to look at the ‘good headphone’ market. I paid (a very reasonable) $2k for a set of reference headphones and a suitable amp/DAC to drive them. I could have spent a lot more. It is hard to drive a set of headphones with enough SQ to make them worthwhile. You cannot plug a set of headphones into an Android phone and expect anything good to happen. And lots of DAPs suffer from software problems…

A $100 amp and good headphones do the job just fine. The current generation of phones has very high quality DACs, beyond what was considered top of the line for premium audio players 5-10 years ago.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#34

Post by gear54rus »

ignoreInstinct wrote: post #8
baxtr wrote: post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage. Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium . And then catches shit for being pretentious. So, let's step through that once more: - garbage is normal - functional and interoperable is premium - premium is prete…

Did you really just call apples products interoperable? maybe among their other crap, but sure as hell not among other devices. Which are all interoperable among themselves btw.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#35

Post by dextersgenius »

> _It turns out that all music players on Android actually play music using the Android-media-player-service._

This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#36

Post by ricardobeat »

Could’ve spent $199 on an iPod, have high quality audio, load your own music, no “apple tax”.

Coincidentally I was looking for something like an ipod shuffle this week and it’s become almost impossible to find, beyond some cheap thrift-store MP3 players.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#37

Post by squarefoot »

Most modern laptops have more than decent audio output, but if more quality is needed one could buy a small external sound card for a lot less than €100. This one for example would fit easily in a notebook bag. https://www.thomann.de/gb/miditech_audiolink_light.htm

About the article circuit, I 'm not that sure the 5532 is a good part for headphone amps, unless the phones have a high impedance and resistance: they're intended as preamplifiers (and very good ones) so they hardly can supply the current to fully drive phones, though I guess they can still be ok for listening to soft jazz in a quiet room:)

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#39

Post by fao_ »

ignoreInstinct wrote: post #8
baxtr wrote: post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage. Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium . And then catches shit for being pretentious. So, let's step through that once more: - garbage is normal - functional and interoperable is premium - premium is prete…

> And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware.

You act like Apple devices do not contain IME?

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#40

Post by ikeboy »

notacoward wrote: post #29

Interesting point buried in here: since Android is open source, you could go in and fix the bug, but then because you're not running an official Android version you'd lose access to the Play Store and other services. Something's not really free if there's a penalty for doing it. Since freedom to run a modified version of software yourself is one of the four freedoms of free software, this highlights the difference be…

You can run the play store just fine on lineageos, which has modifications and isn't official.

https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently

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