The bithead might have some problems because it can be powered by USB. Other DACs run only on battery/AC power so they would have a better chance of working with USB OTG on an unpowered slot.

I would be very interested in the results(and im sure a lot of audio nerds would be as well.)

Hello Folks:

I rip my cd's to AAC using iTunes and copy the directories to N800.

Over the weekend I had the chance to hook up a pair of Sennheiser HD555's to it and the sound was awesome.

With good headphones you will be pleasantly pleased.

Al

Just putting in my .02 - The N810 doesn't sound any worse/better than my 2G Nano. I haven't compared them on my Sony 7506 headphones(which are a studio standard), but on my Futuresonic Atrio's they sound very similar. Will it compete with my home stereo or the studio monitors in my basement studio, probably not, but it's not real easy to carry them around and both sets of those speakers alone cost 3-4 times the cost of the N810.

Also, the earlier comment about in-ear earphones is ludicrous. The futuresonics Atrios that I use are very good sounding for the money($150).

Clearly, what he meant by "Earbuds" was "consumer-grade stuff that came with the device", and not "IEMs" as a whole.

N800 sounds fine on my Grado SR-80s: very little (if any) hiss that I can discern.

The "amplifier lesson" is wrong. The proper lesson is that, while electronic technology in general has improved by huge amounts, amplification technology has not. Tubes still produce the best sound, followed by transistors, and then ICs. It's just that it hasn't gotten much cheaper to make tubes.

So how do you distinguish an audiophile form a rich audiophilistine? One has really old tech s/he swears by.

The n810 sounds fine and sounds surprisingly good even with the internal speakers, perhaps not audiophile, but enough for my portable listening.

With phones or a real amp/speakers, and I'm picky, it sounds as good as any other device (e.g. iPods).

Not an audiophile, never listened to sound from a tube amp, but I am strongly inclined to say you're wrong.

First, you can't say transistors sound better than ICs. The amplification elements in ICs are transistors!

You can argue that discrete circuits sound better than integrated circuits, and that's plausible. ICs suffer much higher leakage currents and interference within the circuit than discrete circuits. (It's worth noting that they also have advantages WRT external interference sources.) The worst case, of course, is the mixed IC with digital and analog components. That is a recipe for trouble.

As long as you avoid interference, and stay solidly in the linear range, any amplification technology will sound good. The differences mainly show up when, in a quest to get the most power out of the least amp, the amplifier is driven to slightly non-linear regions. If I remember correctly, tubes saturate much more gently than solid-state devices, which may well explain why they sound better. On the other hand, given a commitment to avoid the non-linear region entirely, solid-state devices can drive somewhat closer to the power rails. (As well as being cheaper and smaller.)

For reference on the Nokia pin-out connectors used:

http://www.forum.nokia.com/main/reso...nterfaces.html

Yeah, sorry, I should have said discrete vs. integrated circuity. What matters more than both, is, you're right, the care taken to put them together to cut down on interference.

The relevance to the discussion is that a 40-year-old realistic amp is going to have a simpler design, with less sources of noise than its modern consumer equivalent, with a crappy electronic equalizer and super-bass boost, and so on.

Of course, if you check the audophile writings out there, they claim to hear something more. And there may very well be. But I'm not going to hear it on my budget

Heck, my music collection is (physically) in another hemisphere.

That said that the USB OTG port is limited to 100mA by Nokia. Does that mean that there is a hack to get it to output the full 500ma?

A more interesting bit though is

Does that mean that a USB sound card is just plug and play?

Well, I assume the limitation is software, hence hackable, inasmuch as the process of negotiating how much power a device may use is a software process.

Basically, the device is permitted to use 100 mA when first plugged in. The device asks the host "May I use some more current?" in steps of 100 mA (I think), up to 500 mA. At any time, the host may say "No", and the device is not supposed to use any more power. Physically, no extra current is "switched on"; it's just a way to avoid devices using more current than is available.

So the question is whether more current may be drawn without either:

• Burning something up
• The voltage dropping too low
• The host noticing and shutting off power

Don't know if any of these happen, and at what point, with the N8x0. But I'd guess the driver could be hacked to let you try it... if you're into extreme sports.

Of course, this causes some problems for use of power-hungry peripherals. The simple, light-weight solution is a power-injector in the custom OTG cable that you pretty much have to make yourself. 9V battery + voltage regulator, and you're electrically good to go.
But the N8x0 will not permit devices to use more power, because it doesn't know about the power injector. You then have to use a powered hub. (Then the power is known to be coming from the hub, so the negotiation works.)

That's where a hacked driver could be useful, if used only in conjunction with a power injector.

I'm guessing this is an open-source section of the kernel? But it could be one of the proprietary binary-only modules, in which case hacking it is far more difficult.


Yes, I think a USB sound card should be plug-n-play. Only one way to find out though, and I don't have a USB sound card.