Audio quality of Samsung Galaxies?

@jfritzen @Pcd I take your points :-) It does seem a bit convoluted, but needs must. In my case my CIEMs require a little more power than the iPhone's internal amp. It does mean that when I get a new phone I'll be ok without a headphone jack.

_{There was an issue with the image hosting, so I deleted the original post and recreated it using an alternative provider.}

Sadly the people who don't care about SQ have "won".  This is about mass-market consumption not audio quality.  Will probably have to go down the portable hi res player route myself at some point

Ray of hope: although no one could tell me which files my new car could play on its hard drive, it will actually play both alac and flac.  Not sure about its ability to do lossless - will investigate!

Snowy Bear posted:

Ray of hope: although no one could tell me which files my new car could play on its hard drive, it will actually play both alac and flac.  Not sure about its ability to do lossless - will investigate!

Alac and flac are lossless.

Aaaargh! meant gapless!

I use s7 edge and AKGs for bedtime listening occasionally.  THe sound is excellent, better than on my iPhone 5s

But I also use a pair of bluetooth Parrot headphones with it and the sound is not one but two nothes above, .. not sure whether because of Parrots or if because BT is superior to wired in this case ... or both ...

dzambolaja posted:

I use s7 edge and AKGs for bedtime listening occasionally.  THe sound is excellent, better than on my iPhone 5s

But I also use a pair of bluetooth Parrot headphones with it and the sound is not one but two nothes above, .. not sure whether because of Parrots or if because BT is superior to wired in this case ... or both ...

 

Could it be that the phone doesn't have the power to drive the AKGs properly? I'm struggling a bit with the idea of Bluetooth sounding better than wired...

What I've learned so far from surfing the web is that the iPhone SE is probably not so good soundwise as the 5s. Which would leave Samsung S6/S7 or HTC 10 as better options. The HTC would even support up to 2TB SD cards (if these already existed), which means I could copy my entire FLAC library to the phone!

There is a new LG V20 which is promoted as having higher than normal audio quality featuring an ESS DAC.  I suspect the idea of any phone plus a Dragonfly or similar is likely better!

Pcd posted:

Is that Standard SD cards or Micro SD which is generally used in phones, if
it is the Micro SD the biggest I've seen at the moment is 200gb

Yes, micro SD. 200 GB seems to be the biggest version currently, but Standard SDs are already available with 512 GB. So perhaps only a matter of time.

ChrisSU posted:

dzambolaja posted:

I use s7 edge and AKGs for bedtime listening occasionally.  THe sound is excellent, better than on my iPhone 5s

But I also use a pair of bluetooth Parrot headphones with it and the sound is not one but two nothes above, .. not sure whether because of Parrots or if because BT is superior to wired in this case ... or both ...

 

Could it be that the phone doesn't have the power to drive the AKGs properly? I'm struggling a bit with the idea of Bluetooth sounding better than wired...

quite possible ...

But it may be that PArrots have a better DAC built in.  I will check that out too

So I've decided myself for the HTC 10. Phonewise it has excellent hardware, Android needs getting used to when coming from an iPhone, the HTC SyncManager is terrible compared to iTunes.

Soundwise I quite enjoy it and think it's as good or better than the iPhone 5s, more spacious and more clarity. I'm using the 10 with several apps (Qobuz, Poweramp, Bubble UPnP) and Etymotics IEMs.