What DAP for my Car?

Ill keep an eye out for the X5 gen 3 in the next month Fiio X5 3rd Gen. Smart Hi-Res Portable Audio Player - See Specs, Features and Price Audio & Visual Pro Gear

Should be in the USA soon.

 

Yeah, you bring up a good point on switching between songs, etc. Does it have a USB port that can output to your car directly?

 

Well yeah but i don't think you can take the high res stuff to the car that way and it doesn't bring up the display and controls on the car.

 

I have the Fiio X3II and while it does sound great it is useless in my car since it will not play back thru USB and it does not do bluetooth. I have tried the Onkyo HD app on my Ipod Touch and the music does sound better but quite frankly I'm not sure I can actually tell the difference between the DSD files and the FLAC files and the DSD take up a ton of room. My LG V10 phone does DSD has a 50gb hard drive and a card slot that will take up to 192 and that does bluetooth, not as much room as you are looking for but you can use multiple cards. Again though the bluetooth does not play back the DSD files at full resolution and the difference between them and the FLAC files that I have is negligable at best, a thumb drive with high rate MP3 sounds almost as good. USB is tricky because a lot depends on what the system can read and play back.

 

Assuming you are referring to Onkyo HF Player, I do use this for Hi Res and DSD playback on my iPad / iPhone. If I am using Bluetooth headphones (gym) or the internal DAC the music plays, though presumably the app converts to PCM and then on to AAC for Bluetooth. If I use my headphone amp / DAC, music goes in its native format to the DAC. The head unit in my car, however, only controls the standard music app and not the Onkyo app.

Practical points; how are you connecting said device to your car? Does your car's head unit allow you to control track / album selection? I have tried numerous ways over the years of getting audio into my car, from iPods via Aux, iPods via USB, CF or SD cards in the head unit, Bluetooth, FM dongles and now USB sticks. Being able to control your music from the head unit is probably safer than having to reach for a separate device.

My current car audio: USB stick with highest quality MP3 files (and I keep a folder of all of my music converted to MP3 for this purpose) though I occasionally use my iPhone via USB.

 

My car allows for the most control of songs over adding a USB drive with MP3. However I can forward songs using the steering wheel control when using the iPhone Onkyo HF player (Bluetooth or USB connected). The biggest disadvantage of using the USB stick is that if I get a phone call, I have to switch sources...I like having the phone interrupt the music and allowing my to take a call without much effort.

I started DSD and FLAC ripping to MP3 (apologies to those who suggested this earlier and I got annoyed) and will see how these sound but there are soooo many variables in this eternal quest of format vs convenience. However I do appreciate the constructive feedback as I know there are folks out there who have been through all of this already.

 

I guess if you have a Bluetooth connection irrespective of the source format the Bluetooth connection will require the audio to be converted to PCM and then compressed using whichever Bluetooth codec is in operation (probably SBC in most cases; one of these days I will sit in the car with my MacBook and work out what codecs the car will support). A USB connection with a phone or DAP will similarly only support PCM in most cases.

Even if you use a DAP connected via the analogue Aux in it wouldn't surprise me if many car systems use an ADC to convert everything into digital for subsequent DSP.

As you say, multiple variables.

 

I've settled on Tidal and Bluetooth for the time being.

 

What car?

 

Recent Infiniti G37 with the Bose system...it actually plays back MP3 320 fairly nicely but otherwise, sound is really dependent on the quality of the recording provided. It's better than my old car, so I'm pretty happy with it for now.

 

Yep, I have a G35. I just use the hard drive and compact flash which is ok when no CD is around.

 

If you're ok with switching to Android for your next phone, I'd highly recommend the LG V series. I have a V10 which has a sabre dac and amp, decodes 24/192 and plays dsd files natively and sounds surprisingly good. It even has a feature to output through the headphone jack and Bluetooth at the same time which makes it convenient while driving because you can use the aux in jack in the car and Bluetooth for phone calls...

 

for anyone considering a FiiO, Amazon Canada has the original model on currently for $99 Cdn... going fast though, it is a great deal.

FiiO X1 Portable High Resolution Lossless Music Player - Silver: Amazon.ca: Cell Phones & Accessories

 

Well you can always do what I do.

I use an 8" windows tablet running w10 and JRiver MC. It connects to a powered usb hub which connects to the 4TB hard drive, Fiio dac and Logitech trackball control. The Fiio can either drive headphones (for when I used a portable version of this) or it can connect to the aux input of either of my car systems.

I actually have 4 complete setups like this for total redundancy. In the rare event when a tablet won't start (usually due to a low battery) I simply pop another one in and I'm ready to go. I actually have a dozen data sets for redundant redundancy, though only 8 of them are on the portable usb powered 4tb drives, which only have a subset of my collection, but all my significant music.

For my portable rig, I power the external USB hub with an Anker battery/charger unit. For the cars, I have small inverters to power the hub's wall wart, as that way I can keep the grounds isolated. This helps avoid ground loop issues which I get if I plug the powered hub into a grounded 12v source.

Each setup was less than $400 which includes the hard drive and everything. Previously I used a Squeezebox for the cars and that was much more costly and much harder to deal with. It required a small computer to run the server and connect the drives, and it took a few minutes to boot. It was very klugey.

Btw, I got most of the tablets from MicroCenter for $79. They're not overly capable but can run JRiver with 192k-24b files and stay below 70% CPU utilization. Besides, the 4 (which are parts of the 4 systems) I have a few extra tablets just in case. At that price, I figured if any of them died, I could just replace them. For that price, why not? Meanwhile, I can use them as alarm clocks or for other simple tasks.