Watched this review on my Deva Pros! It's true; they sound great, and are easy enough to drive that I get excellent sound quality plugged directly into the headphone out on my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. With the included Bluemini on LDAC, they really do sound almost as good as a wired connection, which is ridiculous. Super-versatile and a great deal, especially considering that I got the complete package 40% off for only $200. The biggest downside is that at about 40% battery, the Bluemini starts beeping so loudly it's essentially unusable, so that means you only get about 5 hours on LDAC at a reasonable volume before they need to be charged to avoid this. All in all though, they're a wonderful, versatile and convenient set of audiophile phones.
The HiFiMan Deva Pro's are THE best deal in HiFi headphones, BAR NONE! And it's really not even close actually! It's basically a "Daddy's First HiFi Headphones Kit, NOW w/ Bonus Wireless!" xD. For $330, you get ↓ 1. A pair of mostly metal build (aluminum frame + forks & stainless steel driver grills) planar magnetic wired headphones with drivers of arguably similar quality (or at least not far behind) as the atm $350 2020 Sundara's (though with a VERY different design, as the Sundara's don't have either Stealth Magnets or the new Neo Diaphragm yet), but with IMO much more warm, "fun", slightly less hyper-analytical, & more pleasing/easy on the ear tuning. I also MUCH prefer the Deva Pro headband. 2. A properly "high-res" (aka full LDAC AND aptX HD support) Bluetooth 5.0 dongle designed specifically to make the above the above wired cans wireless to as best as is currently technically possible, AND somehow still with similar battery life to wireless HiFi cans with ACTUALLY BUILT IN BT radios & batteries! 3. A CRAZY GOOD, analog as hell sounding, and SHOCKINGLY powerful custom designed & fully R2R combo DAC + amp unit that powers both the Bluetooth receiver AND any USB device with just a USB-C cable! (And not just that, but it can do both AT THE EXACT SAME TIME! O_O [though it can only play audio from one of the connected sources at once, ofc 😉]). .... And you get ALLLLLL that...... For just $330... Aka $20 less than you'd pay to get a pair of 2020 Sundara's just by themselves.... Uhhh WHAT?!? O____O It's freaking RIDICULOUS how still under the radar they are for being out since October & with how crazy popular the OG Deva's were!!!
4:35 Here's a HYUUUUUUUGE pro-tip my dude that'll MASSIVELY improve your sound quality when using the Deva Pro's wirelessly!!! First go & unlock the Android "Developer Settings" menu inside "Settings" if it's not already (only takes literally 5 seconds to do, just Google how). Then go into it and scroll down until you find the Bluetooth settings, & then change the ↓ "Bluetooth Audio LDAC Codec: Playback Quality" setting from its default ↓ 1. "Best Effort (Adaptive Bit Rate)" setting (which mostly runs at the lowest 330Kbps quality level [which is worse than even basic ass 320Kbps SBC!] w/ just occasional jumps up to 660Kbps, w/ 990Kbps basically never being touched)... 2. But rather to the maximum "Optimized for Audio Quality: 990Kbps/909Kbps" setting instead! If you can't get hard-locked LDAC 990Kbps to work without interference & skipping, turn off other nearby Bluetooth & WiFi devices and try again! But if still no dice, then just drop down to the middle "660Kbps" setting option (still better than default!) Though sadly you'll need to do this every time you connect your headphones to your phone (thankfully it only takes like ≈5-10 seconds). The setting doesn't stay changed through Bluemini power offs & ons.
What you want is the 909kbps, not 990, by setting 44.1 kHz sampling and 16-bit depth, otherwise you're wasting gobs of that bitrate on "hi-res" nonsense that doesn't improve the audible quality one bit. So the best setting for LDAC is 16/44/909, by a wide margin over any other combination of settings.
@@d0nj03In my case doing this would be COMPLETELY wrong and overall sound quality damaging. Why? Whether or not you should do what you described depends ENTIRELY on your particular audio source. 🤷 With native high-res FLAC or MQA files like I and many others exclusively listen to these days vs last-gen massively lossy formats like MP3 or AAC, you can take proper advantage of the higher bitrates LDAC makes possible (24-bits for FLAC/Redbook CD & up to 32-bit for fully unfolded MQA). Now that said, if you are just streaming Spotify or something else using low-res lossy compressed audio like that, then yes, you are COMPLETELY correct that you'll get better overall audio quality by forcing a 16-bit Bluetooth connection to match the bitrate of Spotify's IIRC 256Kbps AAC song library (it's either that or the still 16-bit 320Kbps MP3). Re-encoding a natively 16-bit MP3/AAC track into a 24/32-bit LDAC Bluetooth stream does nothing but waste precious bandwidth on essentially nothing, but re-encoding a native 24-bit FLAC track into a 16-bit Bluetooth connection causes a significant portion of audio data to be compressed or lost entirely and kinda wastes much of the point of FLAC being a fully "lossless" format w/ NO original data loss if played fully & natively uncompressed in the first place. 🤷
@@Cooe. You're going to lose the benefits of lossless via LDAC anyway, but converting to 16/44/909 retains 64% of actually audible information whereas higher-res settings throw away 70-80% of the information just to accomodate frequencies that you can't hear with human ears and bit depths that you can't hear. 16/44/909 offers the best quality by far, regardless of source format.
@@d0nj03 Sure, you aren't getting all of an OG 1980's Sony Redbook CD spec 44kHz/16-bit @ 1411Kbps quality uncompressed FLAC signal into a 909/990Kbps LDAC wireless one over Bluetooth of course, but a say 96kHz/24 or 32-bit @ >≈2-4000Kbps native high res FLAC isn't going to fit any better, and compressing & re-encoding the natively 24-bit signal down into a 16-bit one on top of that isn't going to do you ANY favors! You'd only be making things worse and losing even MORE data. It's not like re-compressing/encoding the native say 96kHz/24-bit high res signal down to standard CD def 44kHz/16-bit on the Bluetooth end frees up more data for the >990Kbps bitrate data stream... It doesn't work like that... 🤷 You'd need a native 16-bit/standard res source file on the other end for that to work, and that's still just a series of trade-offs (less data loss vs the OG file over Bluetooth in exchange for ditching native high resolution encoding). And 96kHz/32-bit @ 990Kbps is still far, FAAAAAAAAAR closer to FLAC's max 192kHz/32-bit spec than it is to either AAC's OR SBC's 44kHz/16-bit @ 256/320Kbps maximum caps. CD ripped FLACs (so 48kHz/24-bit @ 1411Kbps) over hard locked 48kHz/24-bit LDAC 909Kbps is literally as absolutely freaking close as you can get to true lossless wireless audio with current Bluetooth technology, but native high res (>44kHz/16-bit) audio from modern native high res streaming services like Tidal (where Redbook CD 44kHz/16-bit @ 1411Kbps FLAC is only the 2nd highest quality level) can actually sound BETTER despite technically "losing more data" bc it's even more lossy at the same 909/990Kbps cap. 🤷 And with native high resolution audio you can most DEFINITELY tell the difference by leaving it at the native sample rate & bit depth vs re-compressing/encoding it down to say 44kHz/16-bit.
Watched this review on my Deva Pros! It's true; they sound great, and are easy enough to drive that I get excellent sound quality plugged directly into the headphone out on my Focusrite Scarlett 2i4. With the included Bluemini on LDAC, they really do sound almost as good as a wired connection, which is ridiculous. Super-versatile and a great deal, especially considering that I got the complete package 40% off for only $200. The biggest downside is that at about 40% battery, the Bluemini starts beeping so loudly it's essentially unusable, so that means you only get about 5 hours on LDAC at a reasonable volume before they need to be charged to avoid this. All in all though, they're a wonderful, versatile and convenient set of audiophile phones.
The HiFiMan Deva Pro's are THE best deal in HiFi headphones, BAR NONE! And it's really not even close actually!
It's basically a "Daddy's First HiFi Headphones Kit, NOW w/ Bonus Wireless!" xD.
For $330, you get ↓
1. A pair of mostly metal build (aluminum frame + forks & stainless steel driver grills) planar magnetic wired headphones with drivers of arguably similar quality (or at least not far behind) as the atm $350 2020 Sundara's (though with a VERY different design, as the Sundara's don't have either Stealth Magnets or the new Neo Diaphragm yet), but with IMO much more warm, "fun", slightly less hyper-analytical, & more pleasing/easy on the ear tuning. I also MUCH prefer the Deva Pro headband.
2. A properly "high-res" (aka full LDAC AND aptX HD support) Bluetooth 5.0 dongle designed specifically to make the above the above wired cans wireless to as best as is currently technically possible, AND somehow still with similar battery life to wireless HiFi cans with ACTUALLY BUILT IN BT radios & batteries!
3. A CRAZY GOOD, analog as hell sounding, and SHOCKINGLY powerful custom designed & fully R2R combo DAC + amp unit that powers both the Bluetooth receiver AND any USB device with just a USB-C cable! (And not just that, but it can do both AT THE EXACT SAME TIME! O_O [though it can only play audio from one of the connected sources at once, ofc 😉]).
.... And you get ALLLLLL that...... For just $330... Aka $20 less than you'd pay to get a pair of 2020 Sundara's just by themselves.... Uhhh WHAT?!? O____O
It's freaking RIDICULOUS how still under the radar they are for being out since October & with how crazy popular the OG Deva's were!!!
4:35 Here's a HYUUUUUUUGE pro-tip my dude that'll MASSIVELY improve your sound quality when using the Deva Pro's wirelessly!!!
First go & unlock the Android "Developer Settings" menu inside "Settings" if it's not already (only takes literally 5 seconds to do, just Google how). Then go into it and scroll down until you find the Bluetooth settings, & then change the ↓
"Bluetooth Audio LDAC Codec: Playback Quality" setting from its default ↓
1. "Best Effort (Adaptive Bit Rate)" setting (which mostly runs at the lowest 330Kbps quality level [which is worse than even basic ass 320Kbps SBC!] w/ just occasional jumps up to 660Kbps, w/ 990Kbps basically never being touched)...
2. But rather to the maximum "Optimized for Audio Quality: 990Kbps/909Kbps" setting instead!
If you can't get hard-locked LDAC 990Kbps to work without interference & skipping, turn off other nearby Bluetooth & WiFi devices and try again! But if still no dice, then just drop down to the middle "660Kbps" setting option (still better than default!)
Though sadly you'll need to do this every time you connect your headphones to your phone (thankfully it only takes like ≈5-10 seconds). The setting doesn't stay changed through Bluemini power offs & ons.
Yes I did that for testing.
What you want is the 909kbps, not 990, by setting 44.1 kHz sampling and 16-bit depth, otherwise you're wasting gobs of that bitrate on "hi-res" nonsense that doesn't improve the audible quality one bit. So the best setting for LDAC is 16/44/909, by a wide margin over any other combination of settings.
@@d0nj03In my case doing this would be COMPLETELY wrong and overall sound quality damaging. Why? Whether or not you should do what you described depends ENTIRELY on your particular audio source. 🤷 With native high-res FLAC or MQA files like I and many others exclusively listen to these days vs last-gen massively lossy formats like MP3 or AAC, you can take proper advantage of the higher bitrates LDAC makes possible (24-bits for FLAC/Redbook CD & up to 32-bit for fully unfolded MQA).
Now that said, if you are just streaming Spotify or something else using low-res lossy compressed audio like that, then yes, you are COMPLETELY correct that you'll get better overall audio quality by forcing a 16-bit Bluetooth connection to match the bitrate of Spotify's IIRC 256Kbps AAC song library (it's either that or the still 16-bit 320Kbps MP3).
Re-encoding a natively 16-bit MP3/AAC track into a 24/32-bit LDAC Bluetooth stream does nothing but waste precious bandwidth on essentially nothing, but re-encoding a native 24-bit FLAC track into a 16-bit Bluetooth connection causes a significant portion of audio data to be compressed or lost entirely and kinda wastes much of the point of FLAC being a fully "lossless" format w/ NO original data loss if played fully & natively uncompressed in the first place. 🤷
@@Cooe. You're going to lose the benefits of lossless via LDAC anyway, but converting to 16/44/909 retains 64% of actually audible information whereas higher-res settings throw away 70-80% of the information just to accomodate frequencies that you can't hear with human ears and bit depths that you can't hear. 16/44/909 offers the best quality by far, regardless of source format.
@@d0nj03 Sure, you aren't getting all of an OG 1980's Sony Redbook CD spec 44kHz/16-bit @ 1411Kbps quality uncompressed FLAC signal into a 909/990Kbps LDAC wireless one over Bluetooth of course, but a say 96kHz/24 or 32-bit @ >≈2-4000Kbps native high res FLAC isn't going to fit any better, and compressing & re-encoding the natively 24-bit signal down into a 16-bit one on top of that isn't going to do you ANY favors!
You'd only be making things worse and losing even MORE data. It's not like re-compressing/encoding the native say 96kHz/24-bit high res signal down to standard CD def 44kHz/16-bit on the Bluetooth end frees up more data for the >990Kbps bitrate data stream... It doesn't work like that... 🤷 You'd need a native 16-bit/standard res source file on the other end for that to work, and that's still just a series of trade-offs (less data loss vs the OG file over Bluetooth in exchange for ditching native high resolution encoding).
And 96kHz/32-bit @ 990Kbps is still far, FAAAAAAAAAR closer to FLAC's max 192kHz/32-bit spec than it is to either AAC's OR SBC's 44kHz/16-bit @ 256/320Kbps maximum caps. CD ripped FLACs (so 48kHz/24-bit @ 1411Kbps) over hard locked 48kHz/24-bit LDAC 909Kbps is literally as absolutely freaking close as you can get to true lossless wireless audio with current Bluetooth technology, but native high res (>44kHz/16-bit) audio from modern native high res streaming services like Tidal (where Redbook CD 44kHz/16-bit @ 1411Kbps FLAC is only the 2nd highest quality level) can actually sound BETTER despite technically "losing more data" bc it's even more lossy at the same 909/990Kbps cap. 🤷 And with native high resolution audio you can most DEFINITELY tell the difference by leaving it at the native sample rate & bit depth vs re-compressing/encoding it down to say 44kHz/16-bit.
This is so cool Bruce
I have leand alot great video I might add this too my list too try .
Great work
I like classic rock and jazz too. Right on brother!!!
Nice!!! YT ranking services > Promo-SM!