My 2 channel speaker setup remains somewhat out of commission and my headphone setup is tied to my PC setup. Since I've been spending more time with my laptop I was looking for an inexpensive way to listen to my main PC music drive. I've tried multiple avenues with my laptop, but it just plain sucks for sound quality and I don't need yet another dac, much less one dangling off to the side with a laptop, well, on my lap.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. This really started with me wanting some halfway decent earbuds so I can use the laptop while my better half watches TV etc. After demo-ing several options I settled on the KZ ZSN Pro X. Man, am I impressed. These things are *awesome* for only $20. I didn't even know earbuds could sound this good much less for so cheap. I've clearly missed some leaps in gear over the past 2 years...
It was during the process of trying out the earbuds that I got a pleasant surprise: my smartphone sounds pretty d*mn good! Like, really good. It's an LG V35 from about 2018 and one its features is a 'Hi-Fi Quad DAC'. I'm sure that was a selling point when I got it, but mainly I was just looking for something more reliable than the POS Google Pixel I had at the time. I considered the Quad DAC a likely gimmick and never really gave it a proper vetting, focusing instead on my desktop headgear set up. Not any more.
Turns out the phone's Quad DAC is in fact, the four DAC sub chips of an ESS 9218P:
"a 32-bit 394kHz and DSD512 capable component, with...analog audio controls, jitter controls, and integrated headphone amplifier. The chip also promises 130dB SNR, 124dB DNR and -112dB THD+N."
Amongst the many features of the chip/phone, it automatically detects headphone impedance and adjusts power accordingly.
Not too shabby for a smartphone.
Meanwhile I spent way more time than should be necessary to figure out how convert my music drive connected to my PC to a DLNA server that can stream to my phone. Once done and paired with the KZ earbuds I was shocked by the sound quality. To hell with getting an external dac for the laptop, my phone would do just fine.
Of course there are always the minor details to watch for that I only learned through excessive googling and trial and error: evidently some audio apps bypass the quad dac tuning and as a result the sound quality isn't as good.
"One of the most annoying issues with LG’s Quad DAC is how many apps bypass it entirely. This isn’t LG’s fault, it’s due to the Android OS as a whole. The short version is most Android music players use music APIs native to the OS to sample music instead of the Quad DAC."
This was noticeable with Foobar vs BubbleUpnp. Foobar didn't fare well. Thankfully, LG has a music player that comes with the phone and that did indeed sound the best. Bubbleupnp has a better interface however and still sounds excellent.
With some minor EQ tweaking of the earbuds, I could happily listen to this combo all day.
It also had no problem driving my 300ohm Sennheiser HD6XX headphones.
Android Authority has some thorough articles on these ESS LG phone Dacs and they're worth a read:
https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-quad-dac-1115577/https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-v20-quad-dac-explained-713587/
