I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised, I took a trip with the MOONDROP Variations hooked up to the Qudelix 5K, and the auto equalization and other features are great. The only thing that is a little tricky is the I had forgotten how having a cord to a little dongle on the belt can be a bit of pain. There are two problems:
- The Moondrop Variations are just held with a .75mm pin set and losing one is like dropping a bunch of hundred-dollar bills out, so you don’t really want to take them out unless it is to put them somewhere safe.
- The Qudelix really rocks with high-resolution audio and Auto-Eq, but again its on the belt and you have to manage the cables.
Enter the littlewhite which sounds great
OK, this is a TWS adapter (that is True Wireless Stereo) that is $90 from Moondrop and looks like a little white-collar piece.
It is not as fancy as the Shure TWS Adapters that cost $190 and are two wrap-around ear pieces so there is no cable at all. I just couldn’t bring myself to spend $190 for them (but probably will eventually). But also because it is a collar thingy, I’m not going to lose the earbuds as easily too. Those things also have an MO connector, so you need a .75mm to MO adapter as well.
Anyway, the real drawback is that it doesn’t support auto-equalization. There is a Moondrop application for the iPhone, but that thing is old and doesn’t seem to detect the littlewhite or the Variations for that matter.
But if you have an Android phone it has all the fancy AptX modes vs just AAC which is what comes with iPhones. With the Mac, you do get higher resolution AptX so if you are traveling, you can bring your Mac. Also with a Mac, you can use Rogue Amoeba SoundSource to auto-equalize it. The Variations though are so flat that to me the equalized version is about the same but it could also be that SoundSource is not working properly.
That being said even with AAC VBR 56kbps, it is pretty remarkably good. I have to say at “crappy” 44.1kHz, the sound is remarkably good. I got this by going to the console and then clearing and connecting again, you will get an A2DP configured at 44.1 Khz, Codec: AAC-LC, VBR max: 256 kbps message pretty quickly, there are apparently Apple Bluetooth Utilities that let you set and force things like AptX, which you can find in Developer Tools but is no longer available either as of the latest releases. And there’s a rumor that AptX was silently dropped so all you get is AAC ????.
The controls a little hard to understand, but you basically, press the lowest button for a few seconds and it will say pairing. Long pressing turns it off. And then there are volume controls. The charging is via USB C at the bottom and it glows orange. It is supposed to flash white when it turns on at the bottom but I don’t see that.
It does have a microphone it in, but I haven’t tried that. Same with the Qudelix, but with that thing on the belt, it doesn’t work too well.
