The Qudelix 5K has most of your requirements and is around $100.
You’ll probably have to decide on your highest priorities and then pick from the usual suspects according to that.
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First of all consider to buy USB Audio Player Pro app in order to reach at least 24/192 reproduction from USB output.
I think it’s hard to find a jack of all trades that does well everything you’re looking for and is still lighter than your Samsung.
So I’d look or for a good Bluetooth DAC (no need for UAPP app in this scenario) or for a good USB DAC.
Good DACs doing both well can be most of the IFI big ones but they’re not lighter than your phone for sure.
Decide what’s more important to you, lightness, Bluetooth or USB sound quality and follow the path you choose.
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Thanks for the quick replies. I looked at the specs on the Qudelix and it looks promising. At the pricepoint I don’t think I can beat it.
Once I get the amp I will test my current audio players. I am using both the Plexamp and Rocket player apps and they both indicated they were doiing 192K but have never tried over USB.
Thanks again
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Speaking of something that looks promising, have a look at Cayin’s RU6 dongle DAC:
https://en.cayin.cn/products_info?itemid=140
Something like this has huge appeal to enthusiasts for the R2R architecture.
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Some of the early impressions of it are favorable, although I’ve read comments suggesting it fares better out of computers than phones. It needs to be reasonably well powered. The impressions I’ve seen are by IEM folks.
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@NickZ @monochromios @ InvisibleInk
I just pulled the trigger on the Qudelix 5K. I am more than pleased. It drives my ER3XRs better than my LG V35 did through the headphone jack. The ER3XRs will be my primary use case as I plan on using this pretty much when flying and working out.
I was curious however, how it would fare with real headphones so I bought an XLR to 2.5mm balanced adapter and tested my HDXXX and Sundara headphones. In balanced mode I did get plenty of sound at about 80% of the balanced volume setting. Not ear-splitting but quite enough volume for me. This was more of an intellectual exercise anyway as I seldom take these headphones out of the house and almost exclusively use them with my desktop PC, Schiit Modius DAC and Jotumheim Amp.
One thing I really liked was the Android App to control the device. It is pretty straight forward and there are built-in equalizer settings for just about every headphone known to man. I’m sure that given the sheer number of headphones listed, some of the canned settings are just copies of others but using them with the 3 devices I tested it did seem to improve the sound a bit.
Another plus is the size of this device. It’s a tad longer than a 9 volt battery and incredibly light. It comes with a little clip to attach it to your shirt which could be convenient. In the box is a very short (perfect length) USB C to C and USB A to C cable.
The only real negatives are:
(1) There are only two buttons to control all of the functions on the device. It took some trial and error to get the device initially on and paired.
(2) It only supports up to 96K music. I am going to have to find a way to “down sample” my 192K flac files to 96K flac before I put them on my phone to save space since I am not going to be able to utilize the full sampling frequency. Any suggestions would be welcomed.
At $109 on Amazon I am quite pleased with this purchase. Thanks for all the help.
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I’m happy you found a solution that pleases you. As by @Resolve with the Qudelix app you have Equaliser APO in your pocket and it is a great added value to an already very good product. Enjoy.
You can check out dbPoweramp’s batch converter that lets you convert a bunch of files in one go. You might try various rates (even 16/44) to see if the larger file sizes are worth the difference in sound.
There is also a primo audio player for android called USB Audio Player Pro. It might do sample rate conversion on the fly but those 192k files are going to take a lot of space.
As resolve says, don’t take the built-in eq settings as gospel. Use them as a starting point or experiment and then follow your ears for adjustments that you like better.
Glad to hear the 5K worked out for you.
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I loaded the trial version of dbPoweramp and it does everything I need to downsample a copy of my entire music library in a single pass. One DSP setting lets me convert the flac files and downsample to 44.1 (or any other value) and a second switch lets me lower the bit depth from 24 to 16 bits. I can even set a filter to ignore the few mp3s I have in the library.
The software vendor gives you a fully functional 21 day trial on the software. Most vendors either give you such a short trial you can’t really evaluate it or serious cripple the trial functionality. Even though I think I can accomplish what I need in three weeks I will probably buy a license.
Thanks for the heads up on this software.
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Just remember to use dither when converting from 24 to 16 bits. dbPoweramp has different dither options, and I use tpdf based on online recommendations, although I haven’t experimented.
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I will take your advice even though I haven’t got a clue as to what “dithering” is.
Would I be better off to leave the 24 bit files as 24 bit and just downsample? I haven’t experimented to see what kind of storage savings would result going from 24 to 16 bit but I will run a few tests.
This is bits per sample, and the number of samples doesn’t change, so 24 bits will be 1.5 times the storage of 16 bits.
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@NickZ, @paisleyunderground, @stephano, @dave
I ran a very limited sample test on one 192K album that I had.
First, and most important, I could hear very little difference between the 24 bit 192K files and the 16 bit 44.1 (I did dither btw) files on my phone with the Qudelix 5K in USB mode. A major caveat, my ears are almost 67 year old.
I got a pretty consistent reduction of almost 50% in size as I downsampled to 96K and 44.1K.
What did surprise me however, until I thought about it some more was that I got almost an additional 50% size reduction when I went from 24 bit 44.1K to 16 bit 44.1. After consideration, this makes sense as the 24 bit structure is probably going to be wasting those additional 8 bits to get one structure into a 32 bit byte while the 16 bit structure will allow 2 to fit evenly into the byte. This is just a wild a** guess to account for the 50% space reduction when reducing the bit depth by 1/3.
Anyway, here are the numbers I got.
Thanks to everyone for all of the help and advice.
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It looks like you are creating compressed files (perhaps flac).
An uncompressed 16/44.1 file of 5:42 (Uptown Toodeloo) takes 60.3mb. You show it as taking 32.9mb.
When compression is involved you can’t directly use bit depth to calculate file sizes. Also, the details of how the sample rate conversion is done can effect the compression ratio.
As a range, lossless flac will give you 50%-70% compression but the exact amount depends on the individual track.
I should have added the info on compression in my original post since it’s clearly relevant to the topic.
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Yes, I am creating compressed flac files. My settings are lossless with a flac compression setting of 5.
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With the Audirect Beam Pro 3, the list of headphones that require a dedicated desktop stack shrinks further. This is an impressively powerful device. It is also an expensive one. If you’re mostly listening to IEMs, the Beam 3 Pro is overkill, but if you want to power headphones and reclaim desk space at the same time, this is the way to go. I did experience some intermittent minor connectivity issues, which I hope are not widespread.
My full review is up on my blog:
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Andromeda (2019 version) balanced 4.4mm from the Fiio KA3. Gets loud very quickly even on low gain from the Fiio. The 2019 Andromedas are 112.8 dB / 12.8ohm so KA3 on high sens low z earphones not optimal volume-wise. But I like how they sound together 
The newer Andromedas are 94db/12.8ohm, probably better for the quite powerful KA3. Cable is TRI Trough 4-core 5N SPC.
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While the Ikko Zerda ITM01 would not be my first recommendation for a DAC/AMP, I think Ikko would have a winner if it stripped away some of the excess functionality and sold a minimalist version of the ITM01 focused on music playback.
. Nice synergy with these two. Ikko Audio OH10 and Fiio KA3.
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Honestly, I’m new to hifi, dacs, iems, and headphones, but after looking a while for something that would work for me, the Qudelix 5k is what I chose, and I’m very glad I did.
Connecting to iPhone took some work to figure out, because I didn’t want to go the Apple camera adapter route to keep cords to a minimum. After finding an inexpensive otg lightning to usbc I was ready to go.
Even for a beginner the settings are simple, but have advanced settings for audiophiles that have more experience than I do.
Honestly, I love it. Custom eq settings from recognizable names like crinacle and oracle 1990 for easily over a thousand iems and headphones.
I’ve enjoyed that a lot with my Moondrop arias, Katos, and blon 3’s, with each custom eq opening up mids and refining the bass at least to my ears.
And the ability to use it as a ldac, aptxhd, aac Bluetooth receiver is a plus. It’s nice to have at least darn to close to hifi Bluetooth for my favorite lossless tracks on VOX.
And the built in battery so far has had amazing performance. I’ve used it for probably six hours straight in high performance usb dac mode only dropping the built in battery maybe ten percent. And the people at Qudelix are honestly amazing with so many of the updates generated from user suggestions. For example the ability to choose charging to stop at 80% to prolong the life of the battery is top notch in my opinion, and that came directly from user suggestions.
Overall couldn’t be happier.
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