Sony Phone plays DSD

[Sam Lord]

Sony Experia Z3 plays these, but doesn't say what rates. Didn't see this mentioned on the forum before... Lots of other connectivity too. This from page 18:

 

Sony Experia Z3

 

Audio Playback

Decoder format

Supported in file format

AAC (AAC-LC, AAC+, eAAC+,

AAC-ELD)

3GPP (.3gp, 3gpp), MP4 (.mp4,

.m4a), ADTS (.aac)

ALAC

MP4 (.m4a)

AMR-NB, AMR-WB

3GPP (.3gp, .3gpp), MP4 (.mp4,

.m4a), AMR (.amr, .awb)

DSD

DSF (.dsf), DSDIFF (.dff)

FLAC

FLAC (.flac), Matroska (.mka)

MIDI

SMF (.mid), XMF (.xmf), Mobile

XMF (.mxmf), OTA (.ota), RTTTL

(.rtttl), RTX (.rtx), iMelody (imy)

MP3

MP3 (.mp3)

PCM

WAV (.wav)

Vorbis

OGG (.ogg), Matroska (.mkv)

WMA

ASF (.wm

[Miska]

I have the Z3 Compact. One nice feature it also has is bit-perfect playback to USB DAC, bypassing it's volume, mixing and rate conversion engine (equivalent of CoreAudio).

[One and a half]

If the phone is partnered with a suitable DSD DAC like the PHA-3 or PHA-2, the SQ not bad at all. There's a direct input into the DAC from the phone.

 

I have the Xperia Z2 and it plays FLAC to 192fs but balks at DSD. Not sure if the Poweramp app SRC the files, the processor could certainly achieve the conversion on the fly, but there's not much of lag in performance while playing hires music, leads me to believe the phone is playing the files as is.

 

The extra SD card allows for expansion, but with a huge library to choose, which songs do you leave out? Age old problem!

[Cebolla]

You could always network stream the music files via UPnP/DLNA,from a NAS or other network storage device, so long as the player app supports it. Of course it requires a WiFi connection decent enough for hi-res, in the first place. Not much use if your out and about, though!

[Miska]

I use it when I'm on move... Streaming from cloud storage would be cool though. Now I just tend to use Spotify.

[Cebolla]

Indeed - the excellent BubbleUPnP app supports playback from quite a few of the cloud storage services. Some UPnP/DLNA media servers can even be set up to be securely accessed over the internet, so access from your own private 'cloud'.

 

Of course, the internet can be much more of a bottleneck than WiFi for hi-res and certainly much harder to guarantee no dropouts.

[Miska]

Indeed - the excellent BubbleUPnP app supports playback from quite a few of the cloud storage services.

 

Good that you reminded, I have it installed for use as control point for HQPlayer Embedded, so I need to try how it would work with cloud storage.

 

Of course, the internet can be much more of a bottleneck than WiFi for hi-res and certainly much harder to guarantee no dropouts.

 

LTE networks here average at roughly 30 Mbps down speed, I'll try how well it would work. Shouldn't be too much issue with RedBook FLACs at least.

[wappinghigh]

I use it when I'm on move... Streaming from cloud storage would be cool though. Now I just tend to use Spotify.

So do I.. LOL.. So do I.

[Sam Lord]

Cool to hear of these uses. Does anyone know whether it is reproducing 24/96 files from the DAC? Hopefully Jussi or Anandtech will do some measurements just to see what she'll do.