Help! Digital Noise with Dragonfly Black and Droid Turbo 2

[Angrymice]

I recently bought a Dragonfly Black USB DAC, and was eager to use it for playing music from my Droid Turbo 2 phone using CloudPlayer, which streams full quality music from Google Drive, OneDrive, etc. Unfortunately, I was very disappointed with the results. The music plays through the DAC, but there are a lot of digital artifacts and distortion. There's a fair number of pops, and digital distortion as if the song had been digitally stretched.

 

Here's some information I've gathered.

First, the distortion doesn't occur if listening directly through the headphone jack, or the phone's internal speakers.

Second, I tried playing the files after downloading them to my phone's storage. I played them both on CloudPlayer and Foobar2000. This seemed to improve it a bit, but the distortion was still present. It seems most pronounced in 24-bit and higher tracks. (48k, 88k, 96k). 

My three suspects are:

The USB cable. I didn't get the Dragontail, instead I went cheap and got a 'UGreen' cable (this seems unlikely)

The port. My port has been giving me trouble for awhile: my charger routinely falls out, or disconnects itself. I'm wondering if it's not totally connected. (this seems somewhat unlikely)

The phone itself. It's old, and since higher resolution files seem to cause more trouble, I'm assuming that something's either clogging up the memory, or the processor. (this seems the most likely, though it doesn't explain why I don't get any distortion when using the headphone jack directly).

 

Does anyone have any experience with this setup or something similar? Any advice?

[wgscott]

Your internal playback is a control that eliminates the phone as the culprit (apart from the jack).  Since you already know the charger routinely falls out, it is not impossible that power to the DAC experiences interruptions. That seems by far the most likely explanation, given the observations you reported.

[Angrymice]

3 minutes ago, wgscott said:

Your internal playback is a control that eliminates the phone as the culprit (apart from the jack).  Since you already know the charger routinely falls out, it is not impossible that power to the DAC experiences interruptions. That seems by far the most likely explanation, given the observations you reported.

That makes sense... though I suppose it doesn't really make much of a difference considering I can't replace the port without replacing the phone.

[mansr]

Sometimes the USB port get clogged up with dust and lint preventing proper insertion of a plug. You could try cleaning it out with a fine pin such as a sewing needle. If that doesn't help, it is likely that it is simply worn out.

[tenthousandyears]

General troubleshooting applies here. Start replacing things until you isolate the cause.

 

I would try different player applications, a new cable, then try with a different android device.  Go from cheapest to more expensive.

[jcbenten]

What player are you using?  

• Try USB Audio Player Pro (needs external USB DAC - will not player internal Phone DAC...or at least it did not in the past; My main player - Pixel 2 XL with a host of external DACs - iFI x2, Fiio, Topping, SMSL, Sony)
• Onkyo HF Player
• Pi Player
• Oneamp

 

 

[Angrymice]

12 minutes ago, jcbenten said:

What player are you using?  

 

 

I'm using CloudPlayer because it can connect to my Google Drive and OneDrive accounts so I can play directly from them. As I said, I was hoping to use that as my player so I wouldn't have to load up my phone. Using foobar2000 produced a little better results with local files.

 

I just downloaded the USB Audio Player Pro, though which seems to be working quite amazingly with super deep and clear sound. It's too bad it can't connect to cloud storage, though (it can synchronize with Google Play, though, which is pretty damn cool). Thanks for the suggestion!

[Angrymice]

Actually, RE: USB Audio Player Pro, you can set it up to play from your Google Play (though not OneDrive for business for some reason), so now I'm all set... and it's amazing.