Impressions: Meizu HiFi Decoding Type-C Sound Card

I didn’t actually plan on buying this, but you can’t fight the fact that more and more shitty devices don’t leave you a headphone jack anymore — so now any device that still has one gets called “extremely advanced.” And what’s even stupider: phones losing it is one thing, but tablets too? That I genuinely don’t get…

Anyway, I still bought an adapter. If I’m gonna adapt, I might as well get one with some standards for sound quality, so this time I set my sights on Meizu, which supposedly has a great reputation.

I don’t even know the exact model of this thing, but I got it on Xianyu for 70 yuan, and the listing wasn’t clear either on whether it was Meizu or Meizu Blue Charm.

I tried this thing on a bunch of devices — a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and several phones and tablets — and it works plug-and-play on all of them. Convenience-wise there’s nothing to complain about. As for sound quality, I honestly couldn’t hear much of a difference, but it really does support Hi-Res decoding, and as a convenient little dongle it does the job. It also uses a braided cable, and it holds up reasonably well to bending — that deserves some praise.

In short, one sentence: 70 yuan for an adapter (or sound card) with a built-in DAC — this is about as much as you’d expect, so what more do you want?