Under the hood.

When it comes to hardware specs of popular DAPs with touch screen interface, many are Android based and as powerful as smartphones from a few years ago.  Opus#2 is no exception running the Lollipop on its ARM Cortex-A9 1.4GHz quad-core CPU with 1GB of DDR3 RAM.  As of right now the Android OS is locked, and on the surface you will find Opus own native optimized audio app.  Also, both WiFi and Bluetooth v4.0 are supported, where you can receive OTA (over the air) FW updates, sync the time, and use your wireless BT headphones (though, no apt-X codec support).  theBit promises in a future to unlock Android in order to allow the use of popular streaming services such as Spotify and Tidal, but it’s still work in progress.

From my experience of testing other DAPs supporting these streaming services, it’s not as trivial as some might think because now you are dealing with a modified Android OS which requires customized audio drivers.  It’s definitely a challenge, especially if you decide to open a door to Google Play market where people going to install 3rd party untested apps that have a high potential to crash DAP’s OS.  I assume that once theBit feels confident in having a solid solution, we are going to see an update, but for now to stream with Opus#2 – just pair it up with your smartphone using OTG microUSB cable.

Regardless of the streaming support, the focus of this DAP is still to provide a superior audio performance fueled by two ESS9018K2M DACs with up to 32bit/384kHz true bit-to-bit decoding.  This gives you a power to support most of the lossy and lossless audio formats such as WAV, FLAC, ALAC, AIFF, WMA, MP3, OGG, AAC, APE, and native DSD decoding (supporting DFF and DSF).  With Native DSD decoding, even though the spec says up to DSD128, I was able to test it without a problem using DSD256 files with 1bit 11.2MHz sampling rate.  Opus#2 crunched through them without a problem or buffering stutter.  And I was also able to verify seamless Gapless playback.

The internal architecture of the device takes full advantage of the Dual DAC configuration to process separately Left and Right channels with an efficient utilization of both unbalanced and balanced outputs.  But don’t expect the balanced output to have double voltage swing in comparison to a single ended port.  I assume this was done to preserve battery life, and as a result the unbalanced SE output is 2.3Vrms (w/2ohm output impedance) while Balanced output is 2.5Vrms (w/1ohm output impedance).  Also, as part of a careful design implementation of balanced and unbalanced outputs, balanced has an improved performance of signal to noise ratio (116dB vs 115dB) and crosstalk (135dB vs 130dB).

GUI.

Since full Android support is not enabled yet, for now you are using theBit native audio app on top of the Android OS running in the background.  The app itself is very intuitive with a logical layout and easy navigation which looks great on Opus#2 4” display.

Starting at the top with notification bar, in the upper left corner you will have Playback icon status and loopback selection.  Then, moving to the middle you have volume icon with a step value (150 steps maximum), and in the upper right corner you have a battery indicator icon and a system clock.

Typical of Lollipop Android OS, you can swipe down the notification bar to reveal plethora of other controls.  When swiped down, the notification area has a time with day and date, battery indicator with an exact percentage, and Setup icon.  Below it you have a Brightness adjustment bar, WiFi enable icon with drop-down box to get into wi-fi specific menu, Bluetooth enable icon with wireless Bluetooth menu access, Line Out (to enable line out output), Equalizer enable (which enables the currently selected Preset), Sleep mode enable, Repeat selection (one full repeat cycle, continues repeat cycled, single song repeat), and Shuffle enable.  The pull down bar is very convenient because of the smartphone familiarity and also for a quick access to a commonly used functions.

The main screen has upper half of the display dedicated to showing song’s artwork and if none is embedded – theBit includes a collection of music related images which are displayed randomly as song’s artwork.  Tapping on the area of the artwork brings up file info with Genres/Composer/Pathname and file type and file size.  Second tap brings up lyrics if it’s embedded into the song.  Also, with either first or second tap you get in the upper right corner a Star icon to tag the file as favorite and another icon to add it to a playlist which you can create and name on the fly.

In the upper left corner of that display you have an icon which takes you to file browser where you can sort by Folders, Favorites, Playlist as well as more common sorting by Songs, Albums, Artists, and Genres based on metadata of your audio file.  In the same menu you can also switch between internal memory and uSD card.

Back to the main Playback screen, underneath of the artwork area you have a playback bar where you can fast forward through the song by dragging a pointer while noting the current time marker position and total song duration.  Above this bar you have a counter of how many songs are in the current playback folder and also basic info about the file such as bit depth and sampling rate.  Below playback progress bar you have a full song/artist name and also Skip Next/Prev and Play/Pause touch controls.

From drop down notification bar you can get into Settings where you have a typical smartphone selection of controls, such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and Screen setting with Brightness adjustment and Auto display Off timeout setting.  In Audio setting you can enable Equalizer and select one of the 3 available custom presets which you can customized individually (10 Bands with 31.5Hz, 63Hz, 125Hz, 250Hz, 500Hz, 1kHz, 2kHz, 4kHz, 8kHz, 16kHz) with an adjustment of audio playback in real time.  Audio setting also has Gapless enable control.

Output setting has Line Out enable, Balance (L/R) control, DSP mode selection (Auto, 32bit X-MOS, or 24bit I2S).  Gain control let you switch between Low, Middle, High to fine tune your output to accommodate everything from high sensitivity to more demanding earphones and headphones.  There is also a Sleep enable with Sleep time setting, but I’m not sure if it’s even necessary since Opus#2 by default goes into Super Power Saving mode.  My only BIG gripe in here is that I wish there would be a time to set a delay for Power Saving mode since it kicks in too soon.  When your screen is off during playback, and power saving mode starts, you no longer can control playback with hw transport control buttons.

Another setting is USB which selects Connect mode as either MTP (for file transfer) or Charging only connection.  And USB DAC mode which starts that mode when you connect Opus#2 to your PC/MAC or a smartphone.  Then, similar to smartphones, you have Language and Input selection, Date & Time setting, Storage info to show capacity of internal and external memory, initialize settings (database initialize, settings initialize, and Factory reset), Update (manual system update or to check for OTA update), and Info about the device.

Overall, the main playback screen is very easy to navigate, all the common controls are conveniently located by swiping down notification bar, and the main Settings are clear and self-explanatory.  The touch screen swiping interface is very fluid and highly responsive.  Also, once you start turning the volume knob, you get a brief screen with a volume bar and corresponding value setting where you can quickly swipe it up or down for a faster adjustment.

Page 3: Sound analysis, External connections, Pair up, Comparison, and Conclusion.