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Recently I was in the market for a new cellphone. I've been Android based and wanted to stay in that ecosystem. And I've been with T-Mobile as my carrier.Within those constraints I found myself needing to shop for a new phone after my beloved Sony Ultra Z GPE succumbed for the third time to sudden death (bricked). Google keeps replacing them with no hassles.. but my confidence level has evaporated to zero.
To make a long story shorter... I wound up buying an LG V10... part of the reason I bought this phone was that they had advertised that it had a 32 bit hi-fi dac in it. I didn't explore this claim any further before I bought it... I did not see any other phones even addressing "audio" issues or playback quality.
After buying the LG V10... out of curiosity I did some research to see if I could learn more about what dac they were using.
The V10 is using an ESS 9018C2M dac and the ESS9602C as the headphone amp.My understanding is that these are very good quality components and especially for cell phones.
The amp is said to be able to drive 600 ohm phones at 2 vrms.
I haven't yet listened with any of my better phones (say HD600 and 650's) and I don't have any high quality recordings on the phone yet...
but I'm curious if other folks have explored hi-fi potential when buying a cell phone and what your listening experiences have been.
One other nice thing about the V10 is that it came with 4gb of ram and 64 gigs of built in storage expandable via SD card up to 200 gigabytes (264 gb in total)-- which should give me room to download and store some hi res recordings.
So I am curious about the dac and amp chip...
Mike
Builder of MagneQuest & Peerless transformers since 1989
Edits: 12/01/15 12/01/15 12/01/15Follow Ups:
Mike,
The good news is that is a great combination of parts. The bad news is how Android is getting in the way of playback. You may have to get a better app for that phone to get it to really aspire to the qualities of the dac and headphone amp.
I have a couple android units now in for testing as I designed a couple dacs hitting the market soon that can plug right into any android device. Problem is that android is like a fleet of pirate ships each heading their own course. None of these that have the supposedly same OS, works the same.
Thanks,
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin
Mike,
Head over to Headfi dot Org, there's 84 pages of comments and info on the LG V10. Lots of people using phones for sources now.
Alonzo
Alonzo. Hello. I had read some of that superthread. 84 pages of dialogue. Shew.The V10 has garnered a lot of high praise. Like I said I have not yet explored or listened critically with a good set of phones. I was curious if any forum inmates have listened to high quality recordings on this phone and what their impressions have been.
Some company needs to hire Gordon Rankin to design the audio section of their flagship phone. I wonder if Gordon thinks it would be possible to do something really good within the space and power supply confines of a cell phone.
MSL
Builder of MagneQuest & Peerless transformers since 1989
Edits: 12/02/15 12/02/15
Now that would be worth the price of admission!
My only experience is with a separate player, I've used the FiiO X3 for awhile, it has a Wolfson DAC and AD 8397 amp. Nothing like the combined DACs and Amp in your phone.
The specs show that your phone should have no problem driving some of the higher end phones, but sound wise it's all in the implementation and your ears.
I use my iphone with remote to control the macbook feeding my USB dac ... that's all with me.
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