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Smaller than a pack of gum, the Questyle M12 Mobile Hi-Fi Headphone Amp & DAC can do wonders for your personal music listening experience! All you need are wired headphones and a compatible music source (your Android phone, a Mac, a PC, they all work fine) and you'll be leveling up your audio experience to audiophile levels in seconds. Tech expert Dave Taylor auditions the Questyle M12 Headphone Amp and finds it's a great device ready to go right out of the box.
Check it out at https://www.questyle.com/language/en/m12-en/
Check out Dave's Q&A tech site at https://www.AskDaveTaylor.com/
#questyle #dac #amp #headphones #audiophile
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Can this tiny device dramatically improve your music
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Let's check it out. Dave Taylor here and I'm checking out this
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This tiny device is pretty slick. This is the Q-Style M12 Mobile Hi-Fi Headphone Amp and it has USB-C on one end and a 3.5mm
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audio jack on the other. The idea is you plug it into your music source, you plug your headphones into it and this
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teeny tiny little device is an amp. It's pretty amazing. Now what they've jammed in here is they've built the whole thing around the ESS USB DAC
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the ES9281 which is actually a pretty sweet amplifying chip and it supports PCM which
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is Pulse Code Modulation and DSD which is Direct Stream Digital and MQA which is Master
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Quality Assured. So this thing can handle really high resolution audio content
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In fact let me give you some specs because we can't avoid it. So PCM it can handle 32kHz to 384kHz at 16, 24 or 32 bits
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The DSD it can do 64 bit at 2.8MHz, 128 bit at 5.6MHz or 256 bit at 11.2MHz and the MQA
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renderer is actually also built into this little tiny device. It's pretty amazing
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A couple more specs. It can reproduce 20 to 20,000Hz at 0.1dB plus or minus the original so it's a very flat
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response which is exactly what you want. It doesn't add, it doesn't subtract, it just gives you the music better
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Total harmonic distortion is, and I'm going to have to show you this number, less than 0.0003%
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That's really tiny. Now it supports obviously lossless music playback and it has current mode amplification and
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it auto matches impedance, right, because when you're using wired headphones like these
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Beyerdynamics Amarons then they have a specific impedance that they want. This will automatically adjust to make sure you get the right impedance and it can handle
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anything from 8 ohm to 600 ohm headphones. That's pretty good. That's pretty magical and it's pretty easy to work with
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Comes with two adapters, one of which is USB-C to USB-C so I plug it in, I plug my headphones
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into the other end and I can plug it into, yes, you're seeing me do this, an Android phone
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If your Android phone has USB-C, you're good to go. You can plug it in and enjoy all the benefits of this
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It also supports Mac and Windows and if we open up their slick little box, underneath
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everything I already have the USB-C to USB-C but it also includes a USB-C to USB-3 or USB-A
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depending on what name you want to call it. So that's the rectangular one
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Either way, you should be able to connect and get it to work with your device
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So having said all of that, what's it like? The answer is, it's pretty sweet
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It's most obvious, it makes your music a lot louder. So when you plug this thing in, immediately turn your volume down to like 10% before you
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put your headphones on. I did not do that when I started and it was like painfully loud
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That was a bad move on my part but I adjusted it really quickly so it wasn't a crisis
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I don't think I had any hearing loss. But it gives you more music because it's an amplifier but it gives you a richer, fuller
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bigger sound. So it's really a little hard to describe but it's like you've been listening to music even
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with really nice headphones in like a certain size the music has and this just makes it bigger
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So you get a bigger sound stage, you get more expansive music
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The highs are a little higher, the lows are a little lower and I actually went back to
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the 80s and listened to some Tomita which was just fantastic and listening to it with
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the Amaron headphones and the Q-Style M12 DAC, I mean it was a definite like back to
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the 80s, I really needed to probably enhance that with some substances
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We're not going to talk about that but suffice to say it sounded amazing
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It sounded like I was in the recording studio with Tomita and he was busy like saying, oh
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here listen to this on big studio monitors on my headphones. Such a great experience
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So your last question I know is, alright that's all super cool, what does this thing cost
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So actually before we get there I want to just tell you that there are some tiny little
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LEDs, let me give you a close up. There are two LEDs on the top that indicate whether it's chosen low or high gain, that
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depends on your headphone impedance and then the lower LED is going to show you whether
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it's using PCM which is pulse code modulation, DSD which is direct stream digital or MQA
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which is master quality assured. So very handy, tiny tiny little lights but good enough right
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In fact I found I didn't even look at them, it didn't really matter to me. I plugged it in, I turned it on, I put on my music and it just sounded great
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It's really all I care about. Ok so we do need to talk about the price but before we get to the price I'm going to ask
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if you could subscribe to my channel. A click or a tap on that little red subscribe button and boom we're connected
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Super handy. Now give me a thumbs up if this was valuable, I appreciate that and let's talk about price
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This is the Q-Style M12 Mobile Hi-Fi Headphone Amp and it comes in black or silver and it's $139.99
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You can check it out at Q-Style.com. I love these little things
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These are so easy, so portable, so simple to carry. It's a smart idea to be using wired headphones instead of perpetually doing Bluetooth anyway
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and this just gives you yet another reason why those wired headphones sound fantastic
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So it's going to make any headphones sound better and why would you not invest in that
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if you already have good headphones. So that's all I got. I'm going to reassemble this and I'm going back to some Tomita
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I love what he did with the Holst's The Planet Suite so I'm going back to that and I'll have
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to catch you in my next video
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