Old phones as streaming sources


   I'm curious how many  of you have converted old phones to streamers. I have found  that when I remove the sim card and shut off blue tooth and wire the phone to a dac with an appropriate USB adapter cable, my old iphone 6s makes a pretty good streamer. Just wondering what others experiance has been. It is a really economical way to source digital to a 2nd or 3rd system. You can even cut electronic noise further by running on battery power when listening and shutting off the screen once the music is rolling. Going one step further would be to transfer local files to the phones memory and turn off wireless altogether. I have not done this but theoretically it should help. I usually just run the Qobuz app and stream from that to my Chord Mojo. What's your experiance?

 

Ag insider logo xs@2xbruce19

I tried an old phone and didn't like it.  I don't care how it measures, it didn't sound good.

@tubeguy76 

Ok, sorry about that.  But if you read the Archimago stuff, or if you look at the HiFi News reviews with measurements, the point is not that every streamer measures the same, or will sound the same.  What they demonstrate is that with some DACs, any differences with stream can be almost completely eliminated.  So it might be helpful if you gave a little more info on your experience.

Software based DACs in smartphones will always be inferior, but better than nothing in a house system, decent for headphones and for streaming in the car.