Here I am in the back garden enjoying a few rays of spring sunshine, trying out my new Dragonfly Black DAC with my also new AKG K550 with my phone.
Really can’t wait for the android update to come,
And hopefully it has full DAC support as it’s not the most pleasing experience with Roon and Android currently. It sounds better than using the headphone socket on my phone that’s for sure but is marred by not bit perfect playback, clicks and stutter when the display goes off. No mqa no hires and it does not recognise the dac.
I would use USB Audio Pro but I want Roon radio when at home so it’s a trade off. Looking forward to the quality of playback I expect from Roon soon. It’s been a long time coming and at least us Android users are getting some well deserved love. Hopefully it also fixes the other annoying Android annoyances with the app.
Dragonfly tends to pick up electrical noise pretty easy over USB. Roon can’t fix the clicks and stutters, USB Audio Pro doesn’t fix that either, unfortunately. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be an issue when music is playing, other than the Dragonfly’s inherently higher-than-my-phone’s DAC noise floor. Hopefully, someday it will include the solution to use Roon away from the core though, as it’s kind of limited having to use Roon only at home and USB Audio Pro when away from home when on the mostly mobile player.
To me the worst thing about the DF, at least DF Red, is, before the latest firmware it was too quiet when using it with IEMs and not using the hardware volume control (I.E. anything but USB Audio Pro.) They fixed that, but they seemed to have pegged the output at max, so using the phone’s hardware buttons, one click up is WAY too loud, and one click down is “mute.” So I have to fiddle with trying minute nanometer movements of the slider on screen between “mute” and the first click. I ended up buying an external analog volume control just to make it usable. Not an issue with full sized cans, but I’m less likely to use DF with full sized cans than with IEMs. Funneling planar power into IEMs by default is my idea of a bad time. Getting proper DAC support in Roon Android would be a big deal for that reason alone. Otherwise, USB Pro remains the only really usable player on the DF Red. I’m not sure if the Android situation is better on the Black since it’s lower gain.
I have no problems with USB Audio Pro and the DragonFly on both my Tablet and Phone. Sounds great no issues with clicks, elevated noise floor or dropouts at all. Same for all the other apps that only use system audio but will output to the dragonfly such as Spotify or Tidal smooth playback.
Roon however is just awful and very flakey any, change to the phones state and it starts to freak out so I believe they can fix this, I say they have to, to make it a viable platform on Android.
Hmm, maybe the Black is much better than the Red for OTG use vs. PC. One of those cases where buying better is actually buying worse. FWIW, I do hear the electrical noise, slightly out of the phones jack as well, but the gain on the Red just cranks it into extreme audibility (on IEMs. It’s very possible the higher impedance of full size cans negates it.) Red definitely causes hiss, though it’s not noticeable while playing music.
I hadn’t tried Roon on Android as output yet though, just as a remote control, so that’s good to know that in it’s present state I may be better off avoiding doing so!
I use iems (Shure SE425) as my main phones on the move with the DFB and no increased noise floor for me. I just use the full cans when at home. I also have iFi Nano iDSD and no issues with Android other than Roons performance. But this DAC is for home listening and plugged into a Raspberry pie, quiet as a mouse it is too.
One annoyance is that Tidal app does not play bit perfect so only get system audio and no MQA into DAC. So MQA on move is not possible as can’t get a decent bandwidth for mobile listening and full Res.
Nice, same Android, Dragonfly & Shure combo club! I’m using SE535 which is higher impedance than SE425, so if you’re not getting an audible noise floor, I’m starting to think I did wrong getting the DF Red instead of Black for primarily Android use. I’d have saved money and reduced my noise floor. Oh well. (The main difference between Red & Black other than being a “better” D/A and having the digital 64 bit volume instead of analog volume is mostly that it’s much higher gain for more power hungry headphones. I figured since I have a bevvy of power hungry headphones around it would pay, but I may have, apparently, compromised my primary purpose in the process… )
It would be nice if Roon added a USB driver into the android app like USB Pro, though I can’t imagine that’s a high priority for them as a mostly home-bound player. For now, if you haven’t already bought it you still may want USB Pro since it does pass MQA to the DF for the full unfolding with Tidal…it’s not quite like having Roon do it, but on the go, it’s still better than the Tidal app. Only catch is you need to set it to bit perfect for MQA, so you can’t use loudness normalization or crossfeed with MQA, so I still debate it’s true utility.
I just changed from iPhone / IOS to Android (note 10 plus) and thought i’d listen to some music on roon via Android / dragonfly and some cans … what an absolute dogs breakfast … utterly un-listenable …
I’ve just received my new FIIO M11 PRO and what a deception when I found out that I can’t have bit perfect nor high res on my device. Of course I can use the Qobuz app that works perfectly (192kHz/24bits with no issue), but please, Roon, make it happen !
And, @danny, maybe you can put this topics in the [Feature Requests] category.
Musically yours.
If its like when I tried Roon on the iBasso DX160 which again has modified OS to bypass Android SRC all my content was resampled to 44.1/16. The device was capable of a lot higher. I since sent the unit back.
Looks like Roons seeing the native rate of the M11 as 192/24 and upsampling it. Opposite of when I tried the iBasso dx160 as Roon saw the native rate as 44.1/16 and downsampled all my content.
The new 1.7 update seems to have fixed a good many of the problems. But (I believe) Roon is still upsampling/downsampling everything to 16/48 to align with the native Android Audio Renderer on my Pixel 2 and still lacks the ability to bypass it for bit-perfect output to an external DAC (like my dragonfly red). If you have the same complaint, give USB Audio Player Pro ($8 app purchase) a try. It’s no where near as “nice polished and refined” as Roon; nothing else is. But it’ll bypass the native renderer and output bit-perfect 16/44.1, 24/44.1, 24/88.2, etc, to something like a Dragonfly, which sure is nice…
Blockquote
Now a roon bridge via UAPP would be a thing.
I’m not going to lie, I don’t know what that means or what that would look like. But if it let me do the one thing that USB APP does for me (bit-perfect output to external USB DAC from my Android phone), but with Roon’s front end interface and all of it’s goodies/bells-and-whistles, etc, rather than the USB APP interface… I’d be in favor of it. At least locally on my own network (where Roon lives), I “need” it less today than I did 6 months ago… but I’d still use it and be thankful for it, if there was a way Roon could make that happen for me…
If Roon where to do both this AND work out over-the-internet on-the-go (port-forwarding?) usage, it’d literally be the perfect piece of music software (for me)…
UAPP can also act as UPnP renderer so it acts as just a UPnP endpoint so can be controlled and music sent to it from other apps and UPnP servers and they take advantage of UAPP. So you make it a Roon endpoint with a built in Roon Bridge. You then control it with Roon.
!