DAC chip in Blackberry Curve 9360?

Dated 03 July 2016

Hi, I wish to know what DAC was installed inside Blackberry Curve 9360 non-camera version. I did goggling but can't find any, except someone hint that it could be a wolfson chip, don't know how true is this.

The reason behind this request is that I recently pop into the Audiophile world and started exploring lossless audio in electronic music. There are a lot of recommendations and reviews from different groups of people talking about headphones, DAP players and source of audio files. After staring at the prices of those high end items, I lost interest on lossless audio for a while. My interest came back to me when I chanced upon an individual saying that I don't have to pay a lot of money to get good quality audio. First, I need a low priced Blackberry Curve 9360 (which I have the non-camera version). The Singtel trade-in price is a mere S$10.00 (BB curve9360 has become as cheap as a very low end ear piece). Next, I purchased online a pre-owned set of Koss Prota Pro for S$50.00. The third thing is to do some hard work (for my case I did not own any lossless audio file), so there is a need to search for electronic music (most of pop songs or rock have electronic music) in the digital format, 44.1 kHz/ 320 bits at skullmp3 and put them into the hard drive of BB curve9360. Now, we come to the operation part of the listening sensation. Power up the BB c9360, select the song under the media section of the menu and plug in the Koss headphone. Put on the Koss headphone to your ears and shift the volume level to max. You are going to re-discover your beloved tune played in a fantastic manner. If the volume level is set to below max, the audio quality is greatly reduced. You are going to miss a lot of fine details like the highs and the lows. Koss headphone is well known for producing massive bass but not muddy lows, and it is pretty good at the mids and highs too. The few songs played are "Thriller", "U got to let the music", "mr Vain", "Teresa Teng". (After the experiment, all the digital audio files were deleted. The files are meant for this experiment only).
I have another phone which is the Xiaomi Mi Note and I tried out the same setup. There is a hell lot difference in audio qualities between Mi Note and C9360. Mi Note is quite disappointing when I heard the songs through Koss. The few songs mentioned above revealed that Mi Note is lacking in clarity, eg: "mr Vain" is less punchy on Mi Note, "Teresa Teng" is having a constant slight humming sound at the lower end. I felt loss when I read up the page at gsmarena com that Mi Note has 24bit/192kHz audio, but why the final sound quality is so much poorer than BB Curve 9360, through Koss headphone? To do a proof test, I played these songs through my PC with Koss headphone. My PC is the low end Lenovo ThinkCenter running MS Vista OS. There are very slight bass and the majority part of the songs are quite flat. At this point, I suppect somethings. One is the DAC chip used in smartphones and the other is the OS this DAC chip is operating on.
Therefore, I come to a conclusion that if I am not willing to spend a lot of money on DAP players, I have to figure out what is that DAC chip used in BB curve 9360 and my next smartphone must have this chip installed in it, and preferably having a BB OS.
The bad thing about C9360 is that it is a 3G phone, very small LCD, weak ram, the battery power for listening to music continuously only lasted 2 and a half hours, even with wifi off, data off and all other apps turned off.
Regards, Simon.

First, if you're talking about lossless audio, you shouldn't be using MP3 files as your source, as they are lossy (it's how they achieve such good compression, though there are newer, better compression codecs that can deliver the same quality at smaller file sizes today). If you want real lossless audio, you need to start with a lossless audio file. That could be a WAV ripped directly from a CD, but those are uncompressed and the file sizes are needlessly large. It could also be a FLAC file, which is lossless but compressed to about half the size of a WAV file, or if you're in the Apple ecosystem, an ALAC file, which is also lossless (usually has an M4A file extension) but is a proprietary codec as Apple loves to do.

Now, once you actually have lossless audio files, you can find a platform to play them on. You don't need a 6 year old smartphone, with all of its liabilities, either. There are plenty of newer phones that have good DACs and amplifiers but have modern OSs, better displays, and can handle higher capacity SD cards for storage. I could recommend an early HTC One (M7 or M8) or LG G-series (G2 or G3). While not as cheap as an ancient BBOS phone, you would be able to get everything you want in a single device.

Hi, I am just highlight what an old smartphone can do. It's no big deal. my thoughts are below:-
First, I have just heard a rich man talking......he has a point looking at his angle. Thank you.
Second, does anybody know what is the DAC chip in Blackberry Curve 9360?
Regards.

Originally Posted by bb9360nonlte

Dated 03 July 2016

Hi, I wish to know what DAC was installed inside Blackberry Curve 9360 non-camera version. I did goggling but can't find any, except someone hint that it could be a wolfson chip, don't know how true is this.

Hi, sorry I cannot answer this question .. but read more below

Originally Posted by bb9360nonlte

The bad thing about C9360 is that it is a 3G phone, very small LCD, weak ram, the battery power for listening to music continuously only lasted 2 and a half hours, even with wifi off, data off and all other apps turned off.
Regards, Simon.

Among the following phones running bb10 (I still have them all);
Classic, Passport Silver, Passport Black, q10, q5, Bold (OS7)

The best of the best, regarding sound quality, is the q5:
- it features a line out, apt-X over bluetooth codec, has a very small form factor, excellent keyboard, great quality display, micro sdcard slot, dedicated volume and stop/start buttons ... hot removal of sdcard and sim card ... and 4g :)

I'm an hifi fan also, owner of an MSR7-NC AudioTechnica Headphone, a Sony C600N BT apt-X headphone, Sony pha1, pha2, pha3 headphone amps ...

And I've always felt like q5 had a better sound, either with line out, headphone out, or even ... SBC over bluetooth, which sounds very strange ... SBC of Passport / Classic and SBC of q5 don't give the same sound output in my car.. I really don't understand why .. Probably due to some "clock/jitter magic" .. but I'm not a specialist in digital audio transmission ..

My car does not have more than SBC over bluetooth, so my prefered setup is a Sony PHA and q5 (with line out at max volume) .

You DO realize that you are replying to a 3-year-old post by someone who likely hasn't visited the site in about that long, right?

I've never understood why there's such a bias against replying to old threads. The posters often provide good information and way more people read threads than actually post in forums, so the creation of that information base is a worthwhile thing.

That being said, I'm skeptical about the Q5 having the best sound (Of the BB10 devices I've owned (Z10, Q10, Passport), the Passport is the hands-down winner in terms of sound quality.

Originally Posted by Troy Tiscareno

You DO realize that you are replying to a 3-year-old post by someone who likely hasn't visited the site in about that long, right?

This is called "Knowledge management", Sir :)

The point is that the OP is long gone, and given that there are dozens of phones with modern, high-end DACs available (not to mention excellent stand-alone players like the Sony NW-A45), and given that those old BB phones have some serious limitations (slow processors, 32GB SD card limits, etc.), it's not very relevant information either. I don't think they support FLAC files, so no uncompressed music.

I get that people have nostalgia for the brand, but even Apple fans aren't going to recommend a 1st Gen Shuffle in 2019 - it's just not practical.

Originally Posted by Troy Tiscareno

The point is that the OP is long gone, and given that there are dozens of phones with modern, high-end DACs available (not to mention excellent stand-alone players like the Sony NW-A45), and given that those old BB phones have some serious limitations (slow processors, 32GB SD card limits, etc.), it's not very relevant information either. I don't think they support FLAC files, so no uncompressed music.

I don't know about the 9360, but the Bold 9900 plays FLAC. I've always found that the sound has a bit too much high end, though. There's a punchiness (is that a word?) to the treble that no equalizer setting really eliminates.

Originally Posted by Shuswap

I don't know about the 9360, but the Bold 9900 plays FLAC. I've always found that the sound has a bit too much high end, though. There's a punchiness (is that a word?) to the treble that no equalizer setting really eliminates.

Some FLACs are just overcooked to prove they sound different, especially on systems that can’t otherwise resolve the difference. Darn marketing.

I have some FLACs that sound like that. It’s annoying. Sometimes the CD sounds better.

Originally Posted by Shuswap

I don't know about the 9360, but the Bold 9900 plays FLAC. I've always found that the sound has a bit too much high end, though. There's a punchiness (is that a word?) to the treble that no equalizer setting really eliminates.

BBOS 7.x on the curve 9360 (if it supported/supports it) will also play flac. Maybe ogg, just haven't bothered testing it myself (may have in the past). Both are open free formats.

Submitted via blackberry passport forever on Wi-Fi