These headphones are equipped with Bluetooth 5.2 and support the SBC, AAC, and aptX Adaptive codecs. Wireless connectivity is excellent with my “old” iPhone 11. The sound is great (Roon app with QNAP SSD NAS and Qobuz). SQ has improved very much with Bluetooth 5.2.
Currently i use my iPhone 11 as ““DAP””. Maybe iPhone 14 would improve the SQ even more than iPhone 11.
If I want to improve SQ even more compared to iPhone, which DAP would you suggest?
A DAP won’t make any difference if your using Bluetooth as it’s not using the more expensive DACs in them for BT. You would only get an upiift using wired ear or headphones. Some DAPs use the higher bit rate BT coded from Sony LDAC but I’ve not heard that sound much better than Aptx and it’s still lossy and you need your headset to support it anyway.
I used to use my phone with Dragonfly dacs and found the Hiby R5 way better and it’s an inexpensive DAP cheaper than those earphones. You can spend as much as you like on a DAP but using BT is a waste of time on them. I tried the A&K Kann Alpha but returned it as it wasn’t worth the extra money compared to the Hiby YMMV. The more you spend doesn’t necessarily mean better, you would get a better Fiio for less than the A&K. One thing is DAPs tend to run on older SoC and use older versions of Android and are not as smooth as using a modern phone for a UI experience , this is more so on the cheaper models, but A&K suffer from this I found.
Given that the iPhone is limited to AAC 256 there can be some improvements, but they are not huge and it depends on the kind of music you play.
I have a few headphones that support LDAC and AptX HD and they sound better on my Android phone than my iPhone, but nowhere near as much as I would think looking at pure number’s.
My DAP does support LDAC , but if I want the best audio I tend to put my over the ear headphones on and use a cable. Sony headphones tend to support BT and cable and then I hear a big difference.
1 Like
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
4
Your right Michael, but that is not an option for me. If there is no solution than I will have to be “happy” with the SQ from my iPhone
1 Like
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
5
Mike Yes OP was looking for improved BT and not wanting to use a cable.
Torben_Rick
(Torben - A Dane living in Hamburg - Roon Lifer)
8
LOL I did find a simpel way to improve SQ and BT range By turning off WLAN/WIFI on my NUC (I don’t use it - just use WLAN/WIFI on my router) where the BT 5.2 transmitter is located the SQ and BT range has improved. Bluetooth devices and WiFi (2.4 GHz) seems to be interfering with each other.
