Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsGood gear, lacking player app
Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2015
I bought this only for playing DSD. It is a good combination of headphone amp, bookshelf speaker amp, DAC with DSD128 support. Overall it is a good hardware.
Now why only 3 stars? Usability and stability! I haven't tested on Windows, but as a Mac user, I find the player software too basic and even lacking. The app provides basic playback, with a playlist where you can drag and drop songs. But you cannot drop a folder. You need to select audio files and drop to the list. When you want to remove songs, you cannot use Cmd+A to select all. These are just some basic stuffs. The player does allow saving playlist, but only in some non standard .xml format. (You used the provided API in NSDocument right?) It feels like 1990's, and it doesn't support the 21st century .cue file for playlist.
Stability is a bigger issue for me. Upgrading to OS X10.11.1 fixed the playback issue that some other user has reported. I put my DSD audio files on a USB3 SSD drive. But still sometimes the music gets messed up like reading from bad CD or weak radio. Luckily there's no high pitch, just distorted sound. Pause the music and resume playing, the problem is gone, for a while. Feels like the data packets got messed up. There's an option to use larger buffer. I tried and it seems to prevent the distortion, but that means before playing every song it will take 5-10 seconds to buffer. The developer seems don't know how to prebuffer the next song at the end of current one. Oh btw the buffering does not always succeed. You might see something like unable to allocate memory. Oh dear! You will need to click play manually and hope the buffering will succeed.
Also on Mac, you are stuck on the SONY provided app, due to not supporting DoP. It's using ASIO, so Windows users might be able to use a better player. But Mac users will have to endure the problems above. iPhone also only supports DoP, so no you can't use iOS app to play either. Strangely, the app looks exactly same as TEAC player. Seems like it's outsourced to a 3rd party dev (who is not very skilled)
I was hoping to use UDA-1 as Amp for now, and when I got a new amp, I could keep it as a pure DAC thanks to line output. The hardware itself is decent. I would give 5 stars for the sounds quality, but only 1 star for usability and stability of the software (on Mac). I'll probably return this one and get either a network connected DAC (supporting NAS), or a usb DAC that supports DoP.
