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The earman4/6/2023 So much so, that I think the next version should omit the Single-ended connector and just offer the balanced. I love good mids, and the balanced output on the Sparrow is very capable. The Mids now have space to breathe and live and timbre is better with vocals much more lifelike and naturals and string tonality greatly improved. Mids: Here again, much better dynamics are on display than the single Ended version. The one drawback, at least to my ear is the bass is now slightly above neutral and those looking for true neutrality may want to eq it just a bit to return it to linearity. Mid-bass is fuller and more detailed with much better dynamics as well. Overall, very linear and clean, but slightly sterile and lacking a touch in dynamics.īass: The first thing I noticed was how much better the extension is in balanced mode with what was a bit dull in SE suddenly digging deep and giving good enough rumble to be used for theatrical explosions etc. Here again, the treble sounds good on SE until you use the balanced output and realize what you were missing. Air and sparkle are somewhat limited, but extension is good with roll-off being above my own personal ability to perceive it. Treble has good detail as well and is still on the same level with nothing particularly jumping forward in the signature. While I liked the mids here, those who love mids really need to use the Sparrow in balanced mode as it has much better dynamics and layering and the mids come much more to life. Mids flow from the mid-bass with no change in level and again very cleanly presented with good detail and textures. Mid-bass is fast and clean with good slam and detail. The limited output power prevents the sub-bass from really feeling visceral, but I have yet to find a dongle with that kind of potency to it. Notes below are divided into balanced and single ended as they sound slightly different and deserve separate coverage.īass is good with some rumble and good extension. One thing I will warn about up front is when you plug in the sparrow, turn the volume down to zero before turning on any playback as it is considerably louder than most (especially the balanced output) and if you just plug it in on 50% volume and hit play you are likely in for a shock, and ear damage. laptops, desktops, phones, tablets, even a couple DAPs and it worked admirably with all of them. I tried the sparrow with a bit of everything around the house. I did find that when used with Hiby or UAPP, I did need to set the output to bit perfect in the software to get the MQA rendering to work correctly. Thankfully I never saw the red indicator which indicates power is present but no USB signal as in most cases that is indicative of a problem. The LED indicator turned white as soon as power was applied and then green for file playback (PCM or DSD), Streaming Tidal Masters yields a Magenta indicator for MQA as well. Plugging the Sparrow into windows, mac, and android devices resulted in it being detected and working properly with no need of additional drivers. When I kept my expectations to 300Ω and models with sensitivities in the high 90s or low 100s, all worked well. I tested the sparrow using my 600Ω Beyer 990 and it was able to drive them to usable levels but not with a lot of headroom above that so I would say while possible, the sparrow is more at home with easier to drive models. The sparrow lists output as up to 4V into 600Ω balanced or 2V into the same via the single ended connector. As such, there is always a target range of earphones and headphones products are designed to power, and it usually is those below 150Ω with fairly high sensitivities. The trade off usually comes when we look at output power vs battery life as there is simply no way to increase output without increasing consumption commensurately. Needless to say there is a price difference between the two chips so some vendors will opt to leave off MQA to save on cost, while others like Earmen choose to use the more expensive part and provide the end user greater functionality. The biggest difference in the two ESS chips is MQA support with the 9281 having full hardware unfolding and the 9270 omitting it. We are increasingly seeing either the 9281 or 9270 used in dongle products for this reason as they are low-power devices with very small footprints required to support them. What ESS has done is created a chip (They call it a codec) that can handle USB input, convert that input to analog, amplify it and output it with almost no supporting characters involved. The 9281 is a system on chip that incorporates a USB 2.0 controller, i2s, stereo line input, microphone input, and a DAC supporting up to 32/384 PCM, DSD128, and hardware MQA unfolding on chip. The Sparrow uses Ess Technology’s ES9281Pro to do most of its work.
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