FiiO Q3 + phone VS Sony NW A55 or Shanling M3X

Has anyone ever tried this? How is it compared in terms of sound quality. Price wise, phone + Q3 is much expensive. But yeah everyone has a phone. Thanks

I’ve used Q3, nw A105 and M3X. Now I only own M3X.

First of all, you should consider if you want a dedicated DAP or just a stream player.

The phone route requires a dongle and an sd slot, assuming you want to play flac files. Also if its your main phone, you’ll be sharing battery life and distractions.

Maybe you could give us an idea of what you’re going to plug into the options. Most iems just need a dongle.

M3X is a beast for the price and ran everything i threw at him. I also have a ddhifi dongle dac and fiio btr5 if I want to leave dap at home.

thanks for your input. Before I can consider whether I need to use a dedicated DAP or not. I need to know how is the sound quality. If the SQ is at par to Q3, then I won’t bother to research.

Currently I have 800 FLAC (+few DSF) songs in my phone, took 2/3 of phone’s storage. Won’t be an issue to me. Battery also not affected using Q3. I only listen 3-4 hours max per day.

I used dongle iBasso DC03 before but Q3 SQ is much better and tunable. I can put phone+Q3 stack into my jeans pocket. No issue in terms of portability. So I no need dongle.

I use EQ and MSEB tuning in Hiby Music app, to add 100$ sound performance on my iem (haha). I don’t use TIDAL/ streaming.