Dell XPS 13 9350 USB Type-C HDMI 2.0 4K 60Hz output with Dell U3415W Ultrawide (Failed experiment with Vizio SB4051-C0 5.1CH soundbar)

 

So I have XPS 13 9350 for almost 11 months now, except early on I tried a USB Type-C to USB A hub which ends up being total failure, I haven’t bothered with this port. Lately my interest for USB Type-C has been resurged after Apple announced their Macbook Pro with four USB Type-C ports. Since I already got a regular USB A hub, my focus this time is on the HDMI 2.0 4K 60Hz output since there is no video output built-in for 9350. I did some researches online about this subject, the information seems extremely scarce. The built-in Intel 520 definitely supports quite high resolution output since those QHD+ touchscreen models can drive at 3200x1800 @60Hz. And an article HERE indicates via Displayport it can output max 3840x2160 @60Hz.

My goal here is to output to my Dell U3415W Ultrawide screen at 3440x1440 @60Hz via the HDMI 2.0 input (The DisplayPort is already occupied with a i5 3xxx desktop paired with Nvidia GTX-960 Graphic card driving at 3440x1440 @60Hz). The only USB Type-C devices I can find that got someone confirmed working are the google USB Type-C to DisplayPort Cable, the Plugable USB Type-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter. Other options are docks such as the Plugable and Dell’s WD15, but they are way too expensive, not to mention not very portable.

So I continued my research and happened to learn that Dell actually has released its own USB Typc-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter (Part#: 470-ABMZ).

Price wise it’s the same as the google adapter at $40, 40% more expensive than the plugable adapter at $25. So I gave the Dell adapter a try since the support list specifically lists 9350 and HDMI 2.0 mentioned, and it worked! I’m able to successfully drive the U3415W at 3440x1440 @60Hz.

Since it’s an adapter only, you need to supply your own HDMI 2.0 cable. I got the Monoprice 6ft one.

The monitor is being correctly recognized as the model no U3415W. Resolution and refresh rate all run at the optimal parameter!

Audio wise, unfortunately it only can output to the built-in stereo speaker.

Therefore, only stereo output is possible.

Since it was a success for video, naturally I would like to go one step further for the audio output. There are other two ways for output audio via the 3.5mm earphone jack or via the Bluetooth. But neither will give you the optimal performance with surround sound. I’m looking at output at least the compressed surround sound DD5.1 and DTS 5.1.

The Vizio SB4051-C0 5.1CH soundbar offers HDMI input and output, allows extracting DD 5.1 and DTS 5.1 from the HDMI then route the video to the monitor. So my exact setup is as follows:

Dell XPS 13 9350 USB Type-C to HDMI 2.0 adapter –> HDMI input on soundbar, HDMI output->Dell U3415W monitor. This setup unfortunately did not work out. I have some doubt about whether the soundbar supports HDMI 2.0 would play into a factor, and I was right.

The Dell U3415W is being recognized as a DTV CP9687. Any resolution beyond 1080p gets 30Hz and below.

And this CP9687 chip seems only support Dolby Digital…

 

Lastly, the other test I haven’t tried yet is to hook up the HDMI to pass through a receiver to see if bitstreaming Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD is possible. To be continued…

SONY NW-A35HN LM Walkman First Impression & Media Go tricks

 

So I just got the recently released SONY NW-A35HN LM from Amazon.co.jp. It appears that amazon japan started shipping even electronics to US now (the product has to be sold by amazon, not by third party). And the shipping is very reasonable for under $7, delivered in three days after shipment, all the way from Japan! Plus you don’t get charged VAT. Only thing not so great is the exchange rate. I also got the silicon case with screen protector.

I had the NW-M505 Walkman for more than two years now. The player is much smaller than I had imagined by just seeing the pictures online. Maybe I was deceived by those NW-WM1A bricks… Should have checked the dimensions first.

Size comparison with a FiiO DAP which I rarely used mostly due to its lack of auto off feature. The A35 is missing a timer function as well… Oh, it includes a hole for attaching straps, very much appreciated.

This is the first High-Res player for me. I waited out A10 and A20 series since the NW-M505 served my general listening very well.

Now I want to move on to mostly playing FLAC tracks, especially those high bitrate FLACs from MORA and the like.

The player supports DSD also, but it’s converted to LPCM internally, pure DSD signal can be output to SONY’s DAP such as PHA-3. The player comes with 4 demo tracks.

I chose the Viridian Blue color. Unfortunately the cable is a proprietary WM-port. Thus now I have to carry three kinds of USB cable, MicroUSB, USB-C, and this cable… The build quality is okay, it’s definitely not giving you a premium feel. I do like the square-ish design as I don’t like rounded corners that much. The device is a lot thicker than modern day cellphones.

The matching color schemed silicon case seems a lot brighter than the player itself. The screen protector is easy to apply thanks to the small size screen. The color temperature of the screen is on the cool side, resulting in too much blue tint to my eyes. Unfortunately there’s no option to adjust the color temperature in the UI. The 3.1in 800x480 resolution is definitely on the lower end nowadays. But the point of this player is a music player. SONY seems to have learned their lesson that full blown android music player does not work so well, therefore they scaled back to basic music playback function this year. Since this is the first generation of touchscreen A series player, the UI is somewhat sluggish, but it’s not too bad. Also the physical buttons are still provided. The silicon case makes pushing the keys hard, I’m still debating if I should have the case on or not. There is also a cover type protector, it has magnet so that when flipped open, the screen lights up automatically. The hardware buttons do not light up the screen thankfully.

The main appeal for me is that the player supports microSD cards. I’m pretty sure it supports higher than the advertised 128GB limit since the previous gen A20 series already supports 200GB as reported by someone here. Therefore I only got the cheapest 16GB model. The system seems to treat both internal and external storage as one big drive. As when play all is chosen, all songs are accessed.

The microSD cards should be formatted as exFAT if they are over 32GB. SONY has claimed they conducted tests based on a 20000 songs combined on internal and external storages that the player will be operated smoothly.

As being a Japanese model, there is only Japanese interface. While the Chinese model provides a number of language options:

 

But I’m a firm believer that there are quality differences between products released in different regions, even if they are manufactured in the same place by the same factory. Therefore I imported this player from Japan instead of China. Considering the devaluation of Chinese yuan, importing from China seems quite appealing, but I would rather pay some premium for a Japanese model. I’ve seen some complaints on the build quality from one Chinese forum saying that the back has slight bulging issue. I did not notice such on my machine. Although on the initial release of the Japanese model, some machine suffers from mixed display of English for the menu so that SONY has to stop the sales temporally.

Unlike M505, the boot time on this player is very long, depends on how many songs you have, it updates the database every time, it could take 30sec to 1 min to complete the boot sequence. My solution here is just to leave the machine on all the time, the standby doesn’t seem to drain battery much at all. When you unplug the audio cable, music stops automatically.

I used two headphones to test the audio quality. Tested with MDR-7506 first, a wired monitor. It sounds very flat, which is the overall signature of the player. The M505 has a warmer sound than this player.

The digital processing on this player is called S-MASTER HX, an upgraded version of the M505’s S-MASTER MX. I have to turn on ClearAudio+ to get more flavor out of the music tracks. Here are a list of sound effects the player supports:

Turning ClearAudio+ will override all these processing. The major difference is that SONY removed CLEAR BASS. So if you like more bass, you might want to have a headphone with extra bass in it. The Equalizer has 6 bands now instead of 5, with added 60hz, probably to compensate the lack of CLEAR BASS? I have yet to play around with Equalizer option, it supports two custom settings aside from a handful presets for different genres. DSEE HX is the solution for poor audio quality sound tracks, it tries to improve the low bitrate mp3 tracks to better sounds. DC phase linearizer linearizes phase shift for low frequency, simulates analog amplifier sound, haven’t tried this option yet. VPT is a simulated surround sound option, haven’t tried this yet, probably never will. Dynamic Normalizer tries to normalize audio volume among different sound track so that they sound in about the same level.

Now switching to the wireless headphone, a SONY MDR-ZX770BN. This player comes with support for Bluetooth ver 4.2. Unfortunately there is a mismatching on the devices here: The 770BN headphone was 2015 product which support SBC and APT-X codecs only, while the 2016 A35 music player support SBC and SONY’s proprietary LDAC codecs. So the best sound I could get is only the SBC codec. I don’t think this sounds as good as the connection from my XPS 13 laptop. Sound is quite muffled here.

The player supports NFC for easy pairing of the Bluetooth devices, therefore the back of the device is plastic to allow signal to transmit, while the front is made of aluminum. As far as Bluetooth usage, the player can pair speaks and headphones for audio output, but it won’t accept any Bluetooth signal such as from the cellphone or laptop unlike M505. The player supports Bluetooth remote control, I tried to pair with an Android Bluetooth remote, but it couldn’t recognize it. So I guess the only remote it supports is the official SONY one which cost quite a bit.  

   

The output power has been upped quite significantly on this gen, 35mW＋35mW（16Ω）compared to mere 10mWx2 from previous gen. The volume is divided into a whopping 100 levels, compared to a mere 16 levels on M505. The menu supports gestures during playback. You can swipe four directions to get to different settings easily. There is on-the-fly bookmark and playlist features. I just wish the UI has a dropdown notification like Android where you can toggle Bluetooth and NFC on/off quickly…

I’ve also been playing around with Medio Go software a bit since finding out simple drag and drop seems to have missing album artwork and some songs have missing characters. One major problem is that Media Go does NOT treat internal storage and mounted storage equally. It supports auto audio track recognition and artwork from Gracenote, but only on the songs that’s stored on internal storage. The solution is to mount the external storage as a mount point on the C drive. And then point the directive to the one on C drive inside Media Go. This has been worked flawlessly to find most of the albums missing info. If you insist to skip Media Go and use drag and drop, do note that the album artwork SONY players supported are baseline jpg only. If you happen to download progressive jpg or png files, they will NOT show as artwork.

         

Other features on this player includes FM tuner, voice recorder, lyrics display, language learning which I have yet to play around with.

       

A final conclusion on this initial impression report is that I’m pretty impressed with this little player. I just need more time to get used to the interface and play around a bit more to have a proper opinion on this machine. So far it shows pretty promising.

LG G Flex as Music Player / Neutron App / GOgroove BlueGate RMT Bluetooth Remote Review

 

 

So I got a LG G Flex from one of the super Bestbuy deals for $200. Since the price is decent for a relatively new device with good spec, I gave LG another chance. My last LG phone - LG L9 only lasted 7 months, which forced to buy a replacement phone - SONY Xperia ION. The L9, while being only a low end device at the time, performed pretty well if not dead…

 

 

The SONY Xperia ION while performed OK, spec looked good on paper, felt really old. It was first released with Android 2.3x Gingerbread, therefore the app partition is only 1.97GB, it started filled up quickly after installing only a few apps. It was a constantly battle to move apps to SD cards and deleting apps to release space, so I was never happy with this aspect. Another thing is no matter which ROM I tried, the dialer is always so slow to launch for some reason. Lastly the battery life is NOT that great, it can last for a day outside (8-10 hours) if I remember to charge it fully. I certainly would not be comfortable leaving home if the battery is 70% or below. I always carry a 2600mah portable battery though…

 

The G Flex is a speed monster compare to all the devices I’ve used so far. Coupled with a 6in screen, it really feels like a computer in the palm of hand now. The curved screen is really awesome, the landscape mode works best for the curve. It made me actually want a bigger TV with curved screen. It came with 4.2.2, I upgraded the ROM to 4.4.2 v20b by using LG firmware tool. (This is an AT&T brand G Flex D950, I don’t have AT&T, therefore I don’t get any OTA updates, the latest is v20f pushed over in September I believe). Then rooted the device using Stump Root with Brute force. Everything worked fine. After upgrading to 4.4.2, the device appears to be smoother. I also installed the G2 Exposed to get rid of the cell vendor on the left of the status bar. One feature I liked the best is the wireless storage, it makes the phone as a network place after activating. It worked sort of like the feature in PlayBook. Another great feature is quickmemo, which is essentially a screen capture with doodling capability. This feature was available on the L9. The battery life is pretty good. I get about 1.5 day of usage on average. The screen on time is not that great though, I get about 3.5 to 4 hours of usage on average. So it’s great for standby, about 1% drop in battery per hour. But if you start using the phone, the battery drops quite fast. But still, I wouldn’t feel uncomfortable leaving home even if the battery drops below 50%. The only bad thing is that it’s picky about the USB charging cable when using with a portable charger, the same cable used with Xperia ION with fast charging would receive a slow charging warning on this smartphone. But I only have to use a portable charger twice so far.

 

 

I don’t have issue with G Flex being a 6in Phablet, it fits my cargo pocket fine. But I preferred putting it in my shirt’s pocket. It fits there OK while you definitely feel the weight. But it’s a tradeoff I’m willing to bear. This time I decided to not get a screen protector, but get a case instead. I chose the official quick window cover. It provides protection to the screen and add a way to power on/off the screen. The double tap works great already without the case, but the case is even easier for locking/unlocking screen. The other thing I’m battling with is the lack of MicroSD card slot. You only get about 24GB available user space from the built-in 32GB storage. Being natively 4.2 Android, it gives unified storage so all 24GB is treated as a big partition. I’m happy with this aspect. 24GB is more than enough to put all the apps, books, and photos. But it’s not enough for any music or video storage.

 

For this problem, there are three options that I know of:

 

 

 

1. USB OTG. You could choose a traditional USB OTG cable, or modern USB drive with built-in OTG port, or maybe a Meenova card reader. This is certainly the most stable and versatile solution. All files are accessible locally. You can use any app of your choice. The biggest disadvantage is the draining of battery though. The USB drives would constantly draw power. Also it would be pretty inconvenient if you attach the USB drive all the time.

 

 

So I grabbed a 64GB Patriot USB OTG drive, it has a micro USB on one side for Android, and another full USB side for PC. The capacity is on par with my mciroSD card used in the Xperia ION. So I was able to keep all data in it.

 

 

2. Apps that have SMB or UPNP/DLNA capability built-in. I recommend Neutron Music Player. This is like Poweramp on steroids. As long as you can get past the UI, especially the settings, it is a very powerful app that can stream all types of music on your PC or NAS. It supports all the format (lossless formats obscure as TAK, TTA) that I can dream of and cue sheets. 

 

 

 

The SMB works very well, now I can stream hundreds Hi-Res, lossless music on my NAS. There is no buffering, no lag, everything works just the way it meant to be. It’s well worth the price tag IMO.

 

ES file explorer is another viable solution if you don’t want to spend that much on one app. It lacks systematic music management like Neutron though. The best that you can do is to use playlist to manage music from folders. The streaming performance is almost as good as Neutron. But you don’t get additional function such EQ, pre-amp, gain, crossfade, normalization, sleep timer etc.

 

3. Wifi Route. The main difficulty for the Wifi is that you need apps that can manage the files. Unlike USB OTG, your files are not accessed as if you are locally. To get them appear locally, the only option would be to use something such as CIFS mounting to mount the folder as a local folder. But you need a CIFS kernel or CIFS.ko module which there is none for G Flex at the moment.

 

I have options 1 and 2. I prefer option 2 for the easy of setup. When I got the phone, I didn’t intend it to be a music player. But I think the audio playback through the audio port is decent enough. The biggest advantage for Android is that I don’t need to process most of the audio file. This compliments my SONY NW-M505 walkman which plays MP3 and WAV only. My setup also includes the FiiO E17 portable amp. It definitely helps with filtering out some background noise. And apparently this guy agrees with my opinion, G Flex (starting at 2:15 mark) is ranked the no.5 on top of the 5 smartphone (no iphone) category.

 

 

Note in my setup that the FiiO E17 is hooked up to the G Flex via standard 3.5mm. FiiO is set as AUX input. So the processing is still done on the smartphone’s internal component, The FiiO is merely amplifies the signal. I could only hope that G Flex would someday get the Android L update so that I can use the USB connection. Android 5.0 is reported to support USB DAC natively with some limitations:

 

 

 

And lastly, the setup wouldn’t be complete without some kind of remote control capability. Smartphones are NOT built like walkman which features hardware controls for music. So I got the GOgroove BlueGATE RMT bluetooth controller.

 

 

At $24.99, this is a pretty steep priced bluetooth device with very limited usage. But it’s still cheaper than the $34.99 Satechi brand I tried last year. That one was only available to iOS or Android, while this GOgroove has a switch that can handle BOTH systems.

 

 

The overall build quality on the remote is pretty decent, the front side has some uncleaned finish for some reason, but a fine file should clean up the finish. The buttons are a bit stiff, but they do respond well. The non symmetrical placement of the play/pause button feels odd, makes the volume up/down keys smaller. I guess they do it to make it a bit easier for blind operation, but the plastic feel of buttons make it not that easy to distinguish which button is which without looking. But after a while, you’ll get used to it.

 

 

The bluetooth remote is a Bluetooth 3.0 HID device powered by an AAA battery. GOgroove claims that it can last upto 12 hours. There is a big catch not mentioned on Amazon or other vendor though: the device will enter sleep mode and disconnect Bluetooth connection after 3 minutes! To re-establish the connection, just press any key. My experiment is that the audio control buttons automatically registers after re-connection. So if the connection is lost, after pressing the play button once, it will re-connect AND issue the play/pause command. But for the bottom camera and voice key, pressing once after entering sleep mode only re-connects, you have to press these two keys again to issue proper command. This could be a deal breaker for some. And every time the Bluetooth connects, the Android system will display a notification, the notification will cause a flicker in some app, while completely quit in some apps. In Moon reader, the notification will quit the book you are reading, and send you back to the bookshelf for some reason… This shouldn’t be a huge deal though since if you’re using the smartphone, you get easy control, almost have no need for remote control anyways.

 

 

The second problem it has is that the remote is registered as a Bluetooth keyboard. By default, Android will disable on-screen software keyboard. It makes sense when you are using a fully functional keyboard. But this remote is NOT a functioning keyboard, so you’ll be forced to turn off hardware keyboard every time it reconnects! To turn off the keyboard, just use the dropdown menu, select “choose input method”, then select the input method you use.

 

 

And again, the 3 minute auto sleep feature really hinders the usage of this remote. So it’s pretty much impossible to use the smartphone while listening to music if you so wanted to use the remote control.

 

 

 

 

 

Finally some good news is that the keys do work fairly well. Some keys perform two functions depend long press or short press. Long press the camera button for 6 seconds launches the default camera button. But unfortunately it stops there, the camera button only works for the default camera app. I’ve tried it with other apps such as Playmemories, and the camera button never responded.

 

So in conclusion is that this Bluetooth remote is a good build quality one, but it has some flaws that you have to fight through. I finally decided to keep it after two weeks of trial.

 

 

 

And to end this post, I had to post some sad news that the included SONY MDR-NC31SP noise cancelling earbud from the NW-M505 Walkman was destroyed in the washer machine. I forgot to take the earbud out… And to replace it, it would cost $37 for the long version. Amazon.co.jp seems the only place that I could find to have the original short version. Of course, the newly released SONY NW-A16/A17 (sold in Japan only) would include one of these. But I don’t think I’m ready for another Walkman for such a short time. I’ll wait and see if the Hi-Res audio SONY’s been pushing will take off or not while slowly collecting those.

 

 

And SONY’s audio store MORA (Japan only) just announced that it would release files in DSD format, but the walkman I’m looking at - NW-A16/A17 doesn’t support these format yet. (Currently MORA sells Hi-Res audio in FLAC format, and these FLAC format are almost non-compressed WAVs, which means they only used FLAC container to include the art work, but didn’t take advantage of the compression so that the file size are huge). Not sure if they would ever support DSD via firmware updates either. One more reason to just hold off while being happy to use my current setup.