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

@lanx0003 Invested a bit more time and watched this 25 minute video with citations about the nature and measurement of jitter.

Leads me to believe it is not that big of an issue. Which, taken with the info discussed above casts some real doubt in my mind about how important the streamer is relative to the dac.

In other words it does not appear to me that there are strong technical reasons that a modest streamer such as a phone can't produce good audio if run through a quality dac...and that is what my ears have been telling me. Now in the interest of full disclosure and fairness I am 71 and have tested my hearing and know it it, at best extends to 11 khz. Amir points out that perception of jitter is most easily perceived in the frequencies closer to 20 khz. So maybe younger listeners could be more sensitive. 

Thank you for checking it out, OP.  May reach out to Archimago and/or Miller AR for a possible answer.

I have an S21 with half a terabyte of memory and I put most of my CD's in it as WAV files. Plug that into a Mojo and headphones into that and it makes for a nice little setup.  Sometimes I use it in the car system.

In other words it does not appear to me that there are strong technical reasons that a modest streamer such as a phone can't produce good audio if run through a quality dac...and that is what my ears have been telling me.

@bruce19  Do tell, what other streamers have you compared to the iPhone?  Frankly, with your self-professed very compromised hearing your credibility on this topic is pretty low from my perspective.