Arrived. Here are my first impressions :
The screenshots on the internet don't do it justice. The device looks much bigger in photos. It is actually very petite. It's not much wider than my Pulsar keys and not longer than a portable mouse.
Sound quality :
Sound quality is a 20-25% jump from my previous setup, which was the Fiio K1, which was itself a good DAC (shown in the picture above). Comparing the sound quality side by side with-and-without the new DAC, it is easily a night-and-day difference when songs are played on this DAC vs without any DAC.
The tonality of the DAC is neutral/analytical i.e it decodes audio as it was recorded by the artist and doesn't add its own coloration to the music unlike most players which forcefully add extra bass and treble to make the song supposedly sound more "disco-like". This one adds no bias, so unless your earphone has some bias/coloration, you'll get a deep, rich, analytical sound that does not sound artificially boomy/or shrill. It has preset equalizers in case you wish to add coloration.
The USP for me was that the sound upgrade from moving from no-DAC to an entry level DAC is very drastic compared to moving from an older DAC to a premium DAC. Secondly, the nearest smartphone that has all the streaming features (LDAC, AptX HD) is the One+ 7, compared to that, this one is sitting at a competitive price point, so I don't have to upgrade my whole phone just for LDAC. Plus, no smartphone has the dedicated DAC that this one has. They all natively precess audio on the phone's Snapdragon processor.
The USB DAC needs drivers of Windows. It worked off the bat on Linux without any drivers. In the DAC mode, it switches to 48khz /24 bits (for context CD quality is 44khz/16 bits).
Testing was done on Meze Classic 12 earbuds (which are also neutral/analytical reference IEMs). All in all, very clean, deep, full bodied sound the way the original artist intended it to be heard while recording.
Some pleasant surprises :
The screen is IPS and has high DPI. I was expecting a half-decent resistive, buggy touch screen like most players have. The screen quality is better than Redmi Note 5.
It is running a custom made Android firmware made specially for this device. It has Wifi song transfer which saves me the trouble of USB transfer. I wasn't aware of this feature when I placed the order. I thought the Wifi was only for Wifi streaming/ Apple Airplay. I don't have an Apple device so this feature would have been otherwise useless for me. It also has Huawei's high-resolution lossless bluetooth codec (HWA), which is also useless for me. It has 5 preloaded music apps like Tidal, Moov, etc, which I've never heard off, also useless.
The only 2 features I needed were >> a premium DAC chip (ESS Sabre 9018Q2C, which is the same chip they use on their other models priced 300$), and a high resolution bluetooth transmitter chip for AptX/LDAC streaming (SAMSUNG S5N5C10B01-6330).
The SOC runs on Samsung Exynos 7270 processor. This is basically a khichdi device with components used from all over the world. Samsung processor chip from Korea, Qualcomm bluetooth AptX/HD codec from the US, LDAC codec from Japan, everything put together in China. There's hardly any 'Made in China' component in it. It's like a Github collaboration of hardware modules put together by a Chinese firmware writer.
I am waiting for the delivery of 1MORE wireless earbuds to test the quality of high-resolution bluetooth stream via AptX.
I'll also think of purchasing it, but next year...
