Thoughts on an iPad as a streaming source?

[ecwl]

1 hour ago, Musicophile said:

I was first thinking to feed my DAC via my regular Belcanto USB-SPDIF converter via the camera connection kit from the Qobuz app. However it turns out the USB our of the CCC isn’t able to power the Belcanto (which has no external power supply). 

I’m a little confused. Doesn’t your DAC have a USB input?

Can’t you connect your iPad via CCC to the USB input of your DAC? Or does that also draw way too much power from your iPad?

[ecwl]

On 11/6/2020 at 3:31 PM, Calvin & Hobbes said:

How would streaming out of an iPad compare in sound quality?

Streaming out of my iPad off battery sounds great. I do it at work with my Chord Hugo 2 & Mojo. I also take my Chord DAVE to my local Head-Fi meets and use the iPad to stream.

 

But I have to admit, I’ve seen this frequently on this site and at Head-Fi where people don’t really share their whole system. And honestly, I think the advice that can be given is really limited. Let’s imagine you have a really old DAC that doesn’t even have asynchronous USB and your old iPad battery is dying so you’re planning to use a cheap third party power adaptor to charge the iPad via the Lightning port while feeding the ancient DAC, your iPad is going to sound horrible compared to say a new streamer with a modern clock feeding S/PDIF with ultra low jitter into your ancient DAC. So everything is system-dependent.

 

Or alternatively, if you don’t already own an iPad, I would never recommend going out and buying an iPad as a streamer unless there are other use cases and components in your system that would support such usage.

 

It’s like saying premium gasoline is great or these racing tires are great. Sure, use them in a 30-year-old Japanese sedan and see how it goes.

[ecwl]

58 minutes ago, Musicophile said:

The A/B test didn’t last long.
 

Somewhat obviously even the suboptimal USB stage feeding a mostly discrete analog stage DAC sounds better than the Dragonfly. 
 

I just hadn’t used the USB in for 5 years now, so had completely forgotten about it. 
 

So to answer the OPs question, the iPad seems to be a pretty decent streaming source so far if you use Qobuz and the iOS app feeding the CCC. If you have a lossless streaming provider, don’t plan on playing any external local files, and can live without a remote. 

Because USB implementations now are very good, we tend to forget a while back, the older USB implementation problems are either related to noise or jitter. But if you’re running the USB off an iPad on battery (presumably without cellular function or have the cellular function turned off), the amount of noise generally is fairly low, even if the USB implementation has no galvanic isolation. And even though older USB implementation have more jitter, all DACs still has de-jitter implementations after the USB section. That’s why the iPad should sound okay. Obviously, more modern USB implementation would sound even better.

Of course, if you’re to plug an old desktop PC to your Exposure’s USB, it would sound worse because now you’re introducing more noise into the older USB implementation that it probably can’t handle. In fact, I can imagine the Dragonfly sounding better than the Exposure when plugged into an old noisy desktop PC via USB as a distinct possibility.

The reason why your Belcanto S/PDIF still sounds better is because you’ve lowered the noise and you’ve lowered the jitter.

Glad you can enjoy your music better while you wait for the MacBook Pro repair. I need your blog so that I’m not completely brainwashed by Gramophone magazine.

[ecwl]

32 minutes ago, AnotherSpin said:

 

Can not disagree with your point. Still, streaming only model seem to be very attractive :-) I am musing about fine one-box or one-box + speakers solution... Can not figure out so far what it should be :-)

A little off this topic. But over the past 5 years, I became more and more convinced that the modern computer audio system should always include some sort of DSP for room correction. You can do it on the computer end or you can buy a device that can do it all for you “automatically”. Ideally, I think convolution filters are better but even simple parametric EQ for bass peaks can often lead to dramatic improvements.

So for one system+speakers options, I think Lyngdorf TDAI (RoomPerfect), NAD M33/M10 (Dirac) are good options. Higher end products like Devialet Expert now allows you to set your own parametric EQ but also has a speaker correction system that is excellent (if they already have your speakers in their database). Or you can always simply the whole system by buying Devialet Phantoms (which does not have DSP).

But then of course, I have the system I do for very specific reasons. If you’re curious, just PM me.