Yoshimi Battles Androids and the DACs

[KentTeffeteller]

A modest laptop with an external DAC and a 500GB HDD or larger is less expensive than all of the latest 5G phones.

My present Fujitsu LifeBook T 731 convertible tablet touchscreen laptop (Core i7 second gen CPU, 2.7 Ghz, 6 GB RAM, and 250 GB SSD) cost less than 12% of the price of a state of the art 5G phone, and less than 20% of the price of an iPad. Outperforms either in terms of useful processing power and workflow usefulness.

 

[JoeESP9]

My present Fujitsu LifeBook T 731 convertible tablet touchscreen laptop (Core i7 second gen CPU, 2.7 Ghz, 6 GB RAM, and 250 GB SSD) cost less than 12% of the price of a state of the art 5G phone, and less than 20$ of the price of an iPad. Outperforms either in terms of useful processing power and workflow usefulness.

Even that's overkill for just playing music.

 

[cscottrun4it]

It sounds awesome, KentTeffeteller. It's doing just what you want it to do. I'm on a different mission, tho. I'm lucky to have a little spare cash to let me play with a crazy idea. The chain will be overkill, no doubt. However, it will meet my needs in terms of living space as I want to use it, hopefully achieve a sound I'm trying to get, and allow my wife to sleep after 10:30 PM. Plus, it will be extensible, if I do it right.

 

[rwartner]

Music player doesn't have to be big or powerful. A phone is capable. The problem is connections. Phone doesn't have enough. That is where laptop beats it. Power and 3 USB connections.
It would be great if phone had all that.
I like my phone to play music for traveling.
Get an OTG adapter and the biggest microSD card you can fit and experiment. You can hook up USB drive and play from it. Or connect to a DAC.

 

[Alobar]

There are times when a cellphone connected to a external dac makes sense. I use a little FiiO headphone Amp and dac for a few things the main one is to supply signal to a pair of JBL LSR 308's that are in my workshop in a building adjacent to the house. I don't want to grab my laptop every time I go out there to work, but this little FiiO lives out there along with an older android phone that is now just for music. I listen to it with the cell connected to my home network and I use JRiver app to access my entire music collection on the NAS drive.

Or sometimes when traveling away from home I use the FiiO for driving my headphones, in this case using a 250 gb microSD card in the phone to access thousands of my favorite music, many in HD. The FiiO had 2 seporate 3.5mm outs, one specifically geared for headphones which routes through its headphone Amp, and the other 3.5mm is essentially a pre out to anything such as active speakers etc.

 

[KentTeffeteller]

Even that's overkill for just playing music.

Not if you're using it to analog transfer and edit music. Or having to declick needledrops where no better copy is available. Some cases where having a machine capable of real workload is helpful.