![]() Yeah, I'm fine with digital attenuation in the DAC, I really just want to bypass the Android audio stack because I can actually hear it (not as bad as Windows). Wow, thank you for the thorough and informative reply, that's exactly the information I was looking for! As such, I think there is value in bypassing the Android audio stack entirely if absolute fidelity is a concern. Same underlying principle (digital attenuation), but better implemented in the DAC chip vs in the OS. In my case, the solution was to keep Android at or close to 100% and let the dongle do the attenuation via UAC2. while I haven't tested Android's resampler and mixer for audio fidelity, I've personally experienced its terrible volume control whereas I got awful noises and a noise gate cutting into my music with volume set to almost zero. It is actually barely worse than an analog volume pot as can be seen from graphs posted by and in turn you get perfect channel matching and more flexibility. That's where letting the DAC chip handle the task via UAC2 comes into play. digital volume attenuation with its reduction in bit depth is a complete non-issue if implemented properly. Analog volume control is pretty rare in the dongle world, and for the most part limited to a high gain/low gain switch. Those dongles with volume buttons also use digital volume control. All other desktop and mobile OSs support UAC2 hardware volume by default. Android doesn't support UAC2 volume control by default, but there are Apps like Hiby, Neutron, UAPP that can do that. Meaning that with a compatible OS or music player, you can send volume commands via the phone's rocker or a GUI, those are sent to the dongle, and it attenuates the signal accordingly via digital signal attenuation (->you lose bit depth) virtually all dongles have digital hardware volume control via UAC2 commands. But I'd be happy to be proven a fool if somebody can show objectively that it's the same. I can definitely hear a difference between bitperfect Exclusive Mode and regular OS playback on Android. Now these buttonless dongles seem to have proprietary drivers so it's not unreasonable to assume that the driver can send the phone volume inputs to the DAC chip in Exclusive Mode but I just never operated one so I want to understand what it's doing. Currently I use the Hiby music player on Android which allows to output in Exclusive Mode (bitperfect) to a USB DAC but this mode disables the Android OS Volume Control and one has to attenuate with the knob on the DAC side. But the 2 dongles I'm most interested in - Hidizs S9 Pro and Qudelix 5K are attenuated by the phone volume controls and that makes me nervous. My question is do these dongles output bitperfect signal without an analog pot volume control? I see some of them have a +- digital volume controls and I assume this is perhaps doing voltage regulation on the DAC chip which is fine. My current desktop brick DAC+Amp is fine but the hedonist in me wants to be able to bring it in bed without getting caught in wires like a fish. I'm in the market for a DAC+HeadphoneAmp dongle since I primarily use my Android phone as a source.
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