Hey guys
The story goes like this. I had an extra pair of active monitors bought keeping a secondary setup in mind. Obviously, a second system at my home was not must to have but nice to have. After my recent DAC upgrade the poor Caiman had to be shelved without a digital transport to feed it.
What I needed was a music/ media player that can play FLAC/MP3 on SPDIF/ USB audio but I was not keen to spend too much on such a transport. I was exploring many options for the last two months though not desperately.
- SBT- not available easily these days but quite expensive if you consider that the DAC part of it is redundant (also, my gatorized Caiman is slightly better than SBT, IMHO)
- Ipod Dock problem is I have only one i-device and its my own phone. Many docks have no digital out and the ones with it are quite expensive. Again the DAC part of it is redundant in my requirement.
- Media Player something like Asus oplay would be great but then I need a display. Switching on a 32" LCD for casual music was not justified.
- A Bluetooth receiver (to work with tab/mobile): still not as good as a hi-res digital source
- A mini laptop something powered by atom processor. Quite expensive; more than 14k? It will be underutilized too.
I had Nexus 7 tab bought for a ridiculous price recently mainly for my browsing tasks and to keep my little daughter engaged happily with some android games. Thinking about using it as a digital music player, there are a few discussions on the net to get USB audio out of it. But I had to flash it. For me rooting was quite a challenge backup, custom ROM, kernel, CWM, recovery, warranty void, bugs, roll back, reset. suddenly there were many perilous words flashing in my mind. Then I came across this app in Play store; USB Audio Player PRO [ quick disclaimer: you know what comes here]
It claims to output USB audio out of an android device without rooting. There was a free (trial) version available to test it out. I installed it, connected the DAC through the OTG cable and started the app. It showed an error (no device found). I rebooted the tab and the USB audio device was successfully detected by the app and it started to play. Wow. The tab with a gorgeous 7 display suddenly became a crisp digital music player. I could not believe I got it up and running within 10 min of deciding to try this app. It even plays 24 bit songs. Impressive! The app has some basic features, playlists, shuffle, gapless playback, upconversion etc, The UI was quite simple but enough for me. It supports digital volume control which you can bypass in the settings. The free version is limited to 20 min of playback and some other restrictions but it did not take much time for me to decide to buy the full version at ~ Rs. 600. Its 100% worth for someone like me looking for a quality digital transport from a device that does a lot, lot more than just bitstreaming music.
The audio quality is great but I do not wish to assess more since I am kind of spoilt by my DAC upgrade and that the experiment was done with my old DAC. But it is certainly clean. I guess I am not really worried about power supply, EMI, CPU load, background services, tweaks, latency etc. that superfluously haunts PC users. The songs are playing smoothly, effortlessly and continuously as I write this article. The battery does not seem to be losing its juice quickly either.
I am quite excited to have setup a nice digital music player that put my spare DAC to its intended use. The excitement is multiplied when you know how much more you can do with an android tab that was bought for about 9k or so.
The downside: You are limited by the device storage for your music library (atleast in Nexus 7). The app keeps asking if it should reserve the USB device every time it starts. It doesnt work with DACs that require proprietary drivers. Not so great UI and not possible to stream music. But these are pretty understandable.
The app page states that it is tested with many DACs like Audiolab M-Dac, Dragonfly, Benchmark, CA DacMagic, FiiO, HiFimeDIY, HRT, iFi iDAC, M2TECH hiFace, MF V-DAC, NuForce uDAC, ODAC, etc
The story goes like this. I had an extra pair of active monitors bought keeping a secondary setup in mind. Obviously, a second system at my home was not must to have but nice to have. After my recent DAC upgrade the poor Caiman had to be shelved without a digital transport to feed it.
What I needed was a music/ media player that can play FLAC/MP3 on SPDIF/ USB audio but I was not keen to spend too much on such a transport. I was exploring many options for the last two months though not desperately.
- SBT- not available easily these days but quite expensive if you consider that the DAC part of it is redundant (also, my gatorized Caiman is slightly better than SBT, IMHO)
- Ipod Dock problem is I have only one i-device and its my own phone. Many docks have no digital out and the ones with it are quite expensive. Again the DAC part of it is redundant in my requirement.
- Media Player something like Asus oplay would be great but then I need a display. Switching on a 32" LCD for casual music was not justified.
- A Bluetooth receiver (to work with tab/mobile): still not as good as a hi-res digital source
- A mini laptop something powered by atom processor. Quite expensive; more than 14k? It will be underutilized too.
I had Nexus 7 tab bought for a ridiculous price recently mainly for my browsing tasks and to keep my little daughter engaged happily with some android games. Thinking about using it as a digital music player, there are a few discussions on the net to get USB audio out of it. But I had to flash it. For me rooting was quite a challenge backup, custom ROM, kernel, CWM, recovery, warranty void, bugs, roll back, reset. suddenly there were many perilous words flashing in my mind. Then I came across this app in Play store; USB Audio Player PRO [ quick disclaimer: you know what comes here]
It claims to output USB audio out of an android device without rooting. There was a free (trial) version available to test it out. I installed it, connected the DAC through the OTG cable and started the app. It showed an error (no device found). I rebooted the tab and the USB audio device was successfully detected by the app and it started to play. Wow. The tab with a gorgeous 7 display suddenly became a crisp digital music player. I could not believe I got it up and running within 10 min of deciding to try this app. It even plays 24 bit songs. Impressive! The app has some basic features, playlists, shuffle, gapless playback, upconversion etc, The UI was quite simple but enough for me. It supports digital volume control which you can bypass in the settings. The free version is limited to 20 min of playback and some other restrictions but it did not take much time for me to decide to buy the full version at ~ Rs. 600. Its 100% worth for someone like me looking for a quality digital transport from a device that does a lot, lot more than just bitstreaming music.
The audio quality is great but I do not wish to assess more since I am kind of spoilt by my DAC upgrade and that the experiment was done with my old DAC. But it is certainly clean. I guess I am not really worried about power supply, EMI, CPU load, background services, tweaks, latency etc. that superfluously haunts PC users. The songs are playing smoothly, effortlessly and continuously as I write this article. The battery does not seem to be losing its juice quickly either.
I am quite excited to have setup a nice digital music player that put my spare DAC to its intended use. The excitement is multiplied when you know how much more you can do with an android tab that was bought for about 9k or so.
The downside: You are limited by the device storage for your music library (atleast in Nexus 7). The app keeps asking if it should reserve the USB device every time it starts. It doesnt work with DACs that require proprietary drivers. Not so great UI and not possible to stream music. But these are pretty understandable.
The app page states that it is tested with many DACs like Audiolab M-Dac, Dragonfly, Benchmark, CA DacMagic, FiiO, HiFimeDIY, HRT, iFi iDAC, M2TECH hiFace, MF V-DAC, NuForce uDAC, ODAC, etc
But its just that I cared less as the tab was a cheaper alternative, serves my purpose as a secondary source and I am not highly particular about its quality as digital transport (mostly used for casual listening by me and by my family members). Rather than comparing a tab with a PC, if the tab was bought for convenience and if it works for digital audio, then why not. Its a lot, lot more clutter free if you come to think of it (greener too). Moreover a good async DAC should take care of jitter if at all that is high on a tab, to a good extent. 
