I have been battling for some time with the use of Arc outputting audio to my Questyle M15i dongle DAC on my Oppo Reno 12 Pro Android phone running ColorOS/Android version 15. First of all, I can confirm that the DAC works perfectly with Arc on my iPhone 16 but as this is a work phone, I would prefer to use the Oppo phone.
What happens with the Android phone is that for the most part, the DACs output capabilities are not recognised and although it is seen by Arc, the only output options are 48KHz i.e. the standard Android output and although this works, sound quality is noticeably poorer than it is using other applications. Sometimes if I unplug and re-connect the DAC a number of times, Arc will finally recognise it and show the full list of sample rate and format capabilities, however, when I try to play music in this state, playback is unlistenable: I get a fraction of a second of music interrupted by silence for a short time, then another very short snippet of music - basically choppy and incoherent playback. This happens regardless of whether I have the playback quality set to balanced, bandwidth optimised, CD or original quaility. I have tried all of the configuration combinations I can find and ensure that the Arc version is always up to date, but I have seen no change in behaviour since I started trying to connect this DAC now.
I have had to revert to carrying my music around with me and use USB Audio Player Pro which works faultlessly with the DAC, so I wonder if there is anything that can be done here to get Arc working or anything I could do in terms of testing for you?
Thanks and best regards, Richard Matthews
Describe your network setup
TP Link Deco X50 VDSL router which my Roon server is directly connected to via ethernet
Hi @Richard_Matthews,
Thanks for reaching out to us to ask about this issue. I think the next step here is to enable some diagnostics on your account so our technical staff can get some more insight into what’s going on here.
However, before I enable this feature, I’d like to ask for your help ensuring we gather the right information.
First, can you please reproduce the issue once more and note the time at which the error occurs. Then respond here with that time, and I’ll make sure we review the diagnostics related to that timestamp.
Hi Daniel,
Many thanks for the response and for looking into this. I have run the tests again this morning, however, something seems to have changed as no matter how many times I connect and disconnect my DAC, I now only ever see 48Khz in the listing of capabilities of the DAC. The DAC is always recognised but I’m not seeing any other sample frequencies or formats anymore.
I rebooted my Roon server at 0705 this morning (UK time) and started testing at 0720. During this time I rebooted the phone to try to get it to see the full capabilities of the DAC and at 0726 I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Arc and power cycling the phone but nothing has made any difference compared with earlier in the week when I was able to see the full capabilities list of the DAC. I stopped testing at 0738 to send this message but I’ll make some more attempts and let you know if I’m successful.
Best regards
Richard
Thank you for your post. We’ll need to escalate this particular case to our ARC developers. USB DACs interact differently with ARC through iOS and Android, and the diversity of implementations with the latter’s audio capabilities means we’re relegated to fixing these compatibility issues on a case-by-case basis.
That said, we have a clear reproduction case here, and we’ll make all efforts to roll out a quick fix. We’ll respond with more information once we’ve clarified the case with devs. Thank you again for the report!