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Author Topic: with Rockbox installed, are all portable music players the same?  (Read 1575 times)

Offline jmarks

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with Rockbox installed, are all portable music players the same?
« on: February 16, 2009, 09:18:42 PM »
I have Rockbox on my Ipod 5.5 and it's great. All my tunes are in FLAC, so audio quality is terrific for playing in my high end car system. I need another player, so here is my question: with Rockbox as the software on the player, does the brand of player influence the quality of playback at all?  Does one company's player have significantly higher quality DACs to convert  the digital file into analog voltage, and if so, which company and which players?
Thanks for your opinions!
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Offline soap

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Re: with Rockbox installed, are all portable music players the same?
« Reply #1 on: February 16, 2009, 09:44:06 PM »
Most of the differences in audio out you see amongst DAPs are in their ability to drive headphones.  Your iPod, for example, is amongst the players which suffers diminished bass output when driving sub ~48ohm loads.
Most all perform much better when driving a high impedance line in.
That said, the Sansa E2x0 (C2x0?) series is known to have a low-level white noise problem audible under some circumstances when accessing the flash memory.
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Offline jmarks

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Re: with Rockbox installed, are all portable music players the same?
« Reply #2 on: February 16, 2009, 10:11:00 PM »
The iPod 5.5 DAC is the Wolfson WM8975, and is really good. The DAC in the 6G is the Apple 338S0394, but the 6G is not supported yet by Rockbox (in fact, no currently in production iPod is, I believe).
I'm not using my iPod to drive headphones, just to provide line in signal to the EQ and amp in my car. I was wondering if people had info/opinions about the DACs available in other players currently supported by Rockbox.
thanks
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Offline nls

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Re: with Rockbox installed, are all portable music players the same?
« Reply #3 on: February 17, 2009, 01:46:51 AM »
To my ears the Gigabeat S sounds a lot better with my Sennheiser HD595 phones than iriver h320 or sansa c240. The gigabeat S uses a wolfson DAC too although a different one form the ones used in ipods, but it' not only which DAC that's used that decides the SQ, a lot of other factors come in to play such as noise from other circuitry, shielding etc. The only certain way to find out how a player sounds to you is for you to try it.
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