Hacker News Reader

Comment by jsjohnst | Hacker News Reader

> You say that but my music collection is 3+ tb of flacs

Can the DAC on your Android actually benefit from the FLACs? Might make sense to re-encode the library into a format better suited to the playback hardware and leave the FLACs at home where the audio hardware benefits from it.

View on HN

At home I use a dragonfly red DAC paired with some open back sennheisers. But even when I'm out and about I benefit from FLAC. I use some noise cancelling Sony headphones which use the lossy LDAC codec over Bluetooth. My FLACs sounded noticeable better over LDAC, I guess because the music is only compressed once.

this is actually a great point that didn't occur to me. when you play audio over Bluetooth, you don't have much control over which codec gets used. if there's a high probability that your music gets transcoded in flight, you really don't want to start with a lossy source. lossy-lossy conversions are one of the only ways to create encoding artifacts that the typical person will actually notice.

Sounds good to me. Wired headphones or aptx hd bluetooth. Benefit from the flacs? I mean, it's just CD quality. 1980's standards! It's amusing how many other elements of technology are massively improved from the 1980's, and some of which are still improving, and yet CD was pretty much perfect, and it's STILL seen as some odd, edge-case extremist for wanting to listen to it and not, I dunno, 128kbps mp3s or whatever.

enthusiasts aren't necessarily using the onboard DAC. plenty of small external DACs exist that can receive a digital audio stream over the phone's USB.

I use the dragonfly red, a fantastic dac and amp that was significant upgrade over the built in phone one.

I’ve tried the Dragonfly on my phone and tablet and it was very unstable, and to my knowledge it was the only one to buy from friends who are far more knowledgeable on that than me.

I use it with the excellent USB Audio Player Pro. It uses its own driver for external DACs, I guess because the Android one is not fit for purpose.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com