I’m looking for a BIFL (or at least last me for a while) music player that can play .wav files, has a lot of storage, is portable, and the parts are able to be replaced/upgraded. I’ve heard about using iPod classics but it seems like they’re unable to play .wav files. Any reccomendations?
Ooh, nice. I didn’t realize those exist. Is there any impact on audio quality?
Well, absent some kind of sample rate conversion that I wouldn’t expect running into, the audio is identical from a digital standpoint, so up until the point where it sees analog conversion, no.
Once you convert it to analog…I mean, it’s a DAC. Could be better or worse than a DAC built into your phone. Nothing intrinsically requires one be better than the other.
I had a phone with a headphones jack, some time back, that had poor power regulation on its internal DAC. If I was charging my phone in my car while playing back music, noise leaked into the audio. I wound up getting a tiny Bluetooth receiver with its own DAC and plugging that into the car’s auxiliary audio input to avoid that. That phone didn’t have a great DAC.
But I’m sure that you can also make a USB-C audio interface with a bad DAC. I have a USB-powered analog mixer that also lets a noticeable amount of noise in when plugged into my USB hub. I put it on a dedicated USB power supply to reduce that.
As far as I know, nobody’s tried rounding up a bunch of USB-powered DACs, feeding them dirty power, and measuring the amount of noise that comes out of them, so… shrug Probably have to try one and see how that one compares.