The Dark Side; Digital audio equipment recommendations and setup.

apholden said:
Android seems like the go-to operating system for these devices now. Do you know if the Fiio has the Google Play Store? I ask because the iBasso doesn't. Instead, it comes with a couple Chinese app stores (APKPure and CoolAPK) one of which wasn't localized to English. I had to sideload F-Droid and Amazon Appstore.
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If you are talking about the Fiio, I don't think originally the M11 had the Google Play Store but a recent firmware upgrade has added it. I don't think the M6 has it

A firmware patch to enable Google Play store in M11/M11PRO/M15 based on the S... - General Discussion - FiiO Forums - Powered by Discuz!

A firmware patch to enable Google Play store in M11/M11PRO/M15 based on the S... ,FiiO Forums
www.fiio.me
 
apholden said:
I just checked out the Hiby. It looks like it has all the same features as my iBasso for half the price.

I think I got ripped off.
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Well I don’t know about that, But I do know that you definitely get a big bang for your buck with the R6 Pro.

Been using it with balanced Denon AH-D7200 cans. It’s incredibly powerful.

I also like that I had access to the Google play store out of the box.
 
AnthonyI said:
No longer in production, but still available, the FiiO X3 Mark III is a nice DAP at a reasonable price. I've had mine for years, does a great job and I've had no issues with it :)
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I have an early Fiio as well. I don’t use it much anymore but the sound quality was pretty nice on it. Only complaint was the UI was pretty annoying to use but mine didn’t have a touch screen or any apps or anything. The newer ones look way nicer.
 
MikeH said:
I have an early Fiio as well. I don’t use it much anymore but the sound quality was pretty nice on it. Only complaint was the UI was pretty annoying to use but mine didn’t have a touch screen or any apps or anything. The newer ones look way nicer.
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That was my problem as well. Sounded great but the UI and the scroll wheel was totally frustrating.
 
For a while I was looking into some of those newer DAPs, but I decided to get the LG G7 as my everyday phone instead (I was already an Android phone user) because of the high-quality quad DAC and the SD card slot- I put a 1TB card in it, filled it with FLACs and use Poweramp as my player, and I love it. I think I spent about $250 on the phone.
 
i almost THOUGHT of getting a DAP.. because i am pretty sure LG will not forever be my main phone company i'll probably coerced into the samsung universe with features or something.. but i also probably dont need to buy a multi hundred dollar DAP when i can buy a 100 dollar bluetooth DAC


also FLAC is the better format than WAV because WAV is horrible with metadata and so foobar always has issues with it
 
DAPs are definitely a niche product with the quality of modern smartphones. Find a smartphone with a SD slot and some way to get good sound out of it (quality built-in DAC, external DAC, or aptX Bluetooth headphones), and you're all set without an extra device to manage.
 
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duke86fan said:
also FLAC is the better format than WAV because WAV is horrible with metadata and so foobar always has issues with it
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Generally yes FLAC is better for metadata. I think WAV has limited fields for metadata where as FLAC is a container and can have a ton of metadata attached to it (Lyrics, credits etc).
 
jamieanderson1968 said:
Generally yes FLAC is better for metadata. I think WAV has limited fields for metadata where as FLAC is a container and can have a ton of metadata attached to it (Lyrics, credits etc).
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Yeah this is true, it can’t carry artwork, for example. The programme, Roon/iTunes etc will carry the metadata in its library and match so its all lost when you switch.
 
Its always best to attach metadata to the container (the music file) as opposed to the reader (iTunes, Roon). Programs like Foobar or Kid3 work excellent for that. Nothing worse than moving thousands of files from one program to another and finding that the library file is corrupted or just cannot be read by the new program. Take it from experience.
 
jamieanderson1968 said:
Its always best to attach metadata to the container (the music file) as opposed to the reader (iTunes, Roon). Programs like Foobar or Kid3 work excellent for that. Nothing worse than moving thousands of files from one program to another and finding that the library file is corrupted or just cannot be read by the new program. Take it from experience.
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If possible. If you can’t you can’t. This is why backing up my Roon library is as important as backing up the files!
 
I have been part of teams building special collections digital libraries for a university and a large public library in the early 2000s. The first one was porting over a homebrew digital library system to a much better, though basic, off the shelf program. The library had about 60,000 images to port over but the metadata was connected to the library not the files. I built a cross-talk program to read the corrupted metadata. It worked, but not well. About half had basic metadata (file name, date, photograph title) but the rest had just the file name. That was a fun 3 weeks for our team, spent about 300 hours rebuilding the metadata.
 
duke86fan said:
also FLAC is the better format than WAV because WAV is horrible with metadata and so foobar always has issues with it
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I can't fault wav too much. It's a really old format. I imagine the development team broke out the champagne the first time they played an 8-bit, mono, 1 k-sample/s file through a Sound Blaster 1.0! At that point, metadata was the last thing on their minds.
 
apholden said:
I can't fault wav too much. It's a really old format. I imagine the development team broke out the champagne the first time they played an 8-bit, mono, 1 k-sample/s file through a Sound Blaster 1.0! At that point, metadata was the last thing on their minds.
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I recently read the book How Music Got Free, and it talked a lot about the insane amount of work that went into the development of the mp3. Like weeks at a time just working on one little sound clip until the algorithm could compress it without sounding horrible. I imagine getting wav functional was a similar headache using the hardware of the time.
 
LeSamourai said:
I recently read the book How Music Got Free, and it talked a lot about the insane amount of work that went into the development of the mp3. Like weeks at a time just working on one little sound clip until the algorithm could compress it without sounding horrible. I imagine getting wav functional was a similar headache using the hardware of the time.
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It's a good book, +1 recommendation!
 
LeSamourai said:
I recently read the book How Music Got Free, and it talked a lot about the insane amount of work that went into the development of the mp3. Like weeks at a time just working on one little sound clip until the algorithm could compress it without sounding horrible. I imagine getting wav functional was a similar headache using the hardware of the time.
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When wav was developed, it was an accomplishment just to capture the data from the ADC and send it to the DAC. No seriously. ADCs spew out data at a high rate, and the computer can either keep up or lose samples. DACs need data at a high rate and will glitch out if the computer can't deliver (usually sounded like a pop). Computers at the time had a lot of trouble keeping up with these data-hungry devices, especially with primitive operating systems like Windows 3. The problems were so low-level that Microsoft had to patch Windows to add support.

Compression? They didn't have CPU power to mess with compression!

As for metadata, they barely even thought of it. Wav's metadata was all necessary to play the file at all: stereo or mono, sample size, sample rate, and technical details about how the samples were written to the file. If you want to store the artist and song title, put it in the file name! All 8 characters of it.
 
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I recently made a full copy to FLAC of my 1,000-ish CD collection (I had ripped them to iTunes forever ago, and then had just my favs in FLAC), but I decided to make sure I'd never need to do it again by going with AccurateRip and backing it all up locally and in the cloud.

One thing that I found kind of amazing to think about was how some of my CDs are over 20 years old, and I played them all the time in cars and a Discman and such, and I can still get a bit-perfect rip. Like, there's something amazing in thinking that not a single bit has been lost in all that time and use.

There's something almost magical about how needles in grooves and the resultant vibrations create music, but there's also something kind of magical about how a stream of nothing but 1s and 0s on a shiny little disc (and now on a memory card) can do the same.
 
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