Technophobe struggling with new kit

Submitted by Bob90d t3_11y0qxi in headphones

Hey! Thanks for popping in to read my post. I have just treated myself to pair or Sony mh-1000xm4, a Helm Bolt DAC and tidal premium for my Samsung s21 5g.

I have installed USB Audio Pro and playing tidal through it however on the current track screen it says USB DAC 48khz / MQA FLAC 96khz.

I presume thus means the track is 96khz and my DAC is only seeing 48khz. I have looked through all menus and had a good search online but I'm not sure if this is correct or not.

Could you please tell me if this can be improved some how?

I have attached a picture for reference.

Thank you for reading.

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DWW256 t1_jd5r707 wrote

Two points:

  1. There isn't any solid research I know of to suggest that humans can hear higher than 20 kHz, and 48 kHz is a high enough sampling frequency to render anything at 20 kHz and well higher. The benefits you would get with higher sampling frequencies are probably nonexistent, and if they're not, they're absurdly small. I don't think you need to worry about it.

  2. MQA adds significant artifacts to high-res audio which, unlike the alleged improvement in resolution, are audible. Plain old FLAC files are generally considered better. See here: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc) (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHkqWZ9jzA0)

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ChangTan89 t1_jd60w8x wrote

You need to turn on bit perfect mode.

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CrossfireAlien t1_jd66j5d wrote

^ this right here

UAPP settings - Internal HiRes audio (bit perfect mode ON)

USB Audio (bit perfect mode ON)

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szakee t1_jd6yqri wrote

there's zero point for anything above mp3 for those headphones.

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lh-95 t1_jd5yppj wrote

Aside from the issues of MQA I’d like to ask:

  • Not to insinuate anything but the XM4s are plugged into the Bolt right?
  • what colour is the LED on the bolt, it should be Magenta when rendering MQA
  • Don’t have an android but does the tidal app hand off to the USB DAC and lead to the LED turning magenta? When I previously used Tidal on iOS it knew that there was a USB DAC and handed off the “unfold” to the DAC
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DMcKibbins t1_jd65a3m wrote

How do the XM4s work when plugged in? Do they still get processed by the DSP or are the headphones passive?

If the DSP is involved, you’ll need to see what its DAC is capable of. If it can only handle 16/24bit or 44.1kHz/48kHz, you’re not really getting any benefit from using higher quality files.

If the headphone goes into passive mode, the music will probably sound worse than with Bluetooth. Most BT ANC headphones are physically designed with a DSP in mind. That being said, you will get some benefit from using higher quality files since it’s purely analog.

As an example, the AirPods Max use a few DACs when wired, but each DAC is rated at 24bit/48kHz. Since the DSP is still involved, it means that wired will sound as good or better than Bluetooth (up to 48kHz/24bit).

Edit: Added a few words at the end for clarification.

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szakee t1_jd6ys2y wrote

>How do the XM4s work when plugged in? Do they still get processed by the DSP or are the headphones passive?

you can have them on or off. Off they sound utter trash.

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DMcKibbins t1_jd7fkhl wrote

Then it sounds like they’re using DSP when on. The headphones will be limited to a certain bitrate if that’s the case.

Edit: Typo

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smalg2 t1_jd6ehr5 wrote

I'd go to "Settings" -> "USB audio" -> "Limit sample rate" and make sure "No limit" is selected.

This should eliminate software downsampling (which eats into the phone's battery life for no reason) but unlike bit-perfect mode it will still allow you to use UAPP's built-in EQ if you want to.

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