This is a review and detailed measurements of the Audioengine B-Fi wifi wireless music streamer with included DAC. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $189.
I must say, the packaging for the B-Fi is well above average for a budget streamer:
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You can't quite see it but the shell itself is a nice white color. The back also shows attention to detail with gold plated RCA jacks and such:
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As you see, power is provided by a 5-volt USB feed. The supplied adapter is above average with company branding which is nice. Like the inclusion of Toslink Optical out for connection to an external DAC or AVR.
At first I thought the unit had Bluetooth and spent 15 minutes trying to find it on my phone to no avail. Then I realize that is a different model and this one is only WiFi and requires their App for initialization. You have to do the classic connection to its ad-hoc Wifi network and then switch it over to your home network. What an abomination networking people bestowed upon us. Newer NFC cable devices solve this but even then they do a poor of job of having indications on the device and such. Anyway, I better not rant....
I tried to connect to my first Wifi network but it would not work. A note in the manual says it only works with 802.11g. A shame. This was standard practice 10 years ago when faster speeds were more expensive. We don't need the higher speed here but like to see connectivity with 802.11a for compatibility sake. I used my secondary Wifi connection and it worked. I was prompted to upgrade the firmware and an informative screen showed the progress and updated the device.
You can use their app to stream your content which I tested. But I also used Airplay streaming from Roon player on my Windows computer using Roon player. Shame it doesn't support Roon natively as Airplay is limited to 16 bits.
Audioengine B-Fi Measurements
My first test was streaming using Roon player on Windows using Airplay. Here is our dashboard:
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My test tone is 24-bits but with conversion to 16 bits using Airplay, we are limited to about 94 to 96 dB. Here we are way short of that with SINAD of 80 dB. The spectrum looks very messy which is likely a combination of many factors from Airplay conversion to DAC artifacts. To remove the latter, I measured the Toslink digital out:
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We get 9 dB performance improvement showing the DAC was definitely low quality. So you can use an external DAC and get better performance.
I thought maybe using their App would get around Airplay limitations but this was not the case. Here is analog out performance again:
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And digital out:
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There is definitely conversion error there from 24 bits to 16 so I created a native 16 bit test file. Here is that outcome:
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This got rid of a lot of the spurious tones which were created due to bit rate conversion but overall performance is still shy of 16 bit performance.
I ran a quick dynamic range test before calling it quits:
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So this is disappointing as well.
Conclusions
It is a shame that the beauty of the B-Fi streamer is only skin deep. After 40 years since the introduction of the CD 16 bit format, this device still can't provide transparency to the format in either noise or distortion. A DIY Raspberry Pi streamer will produce state of the art performance compared to it so software and architecture is not a problem. Execution and lack of quality checking and standards, is.
Now the thing works and produces music. So if you want to use it, I am not going to complain but clearly no attempt was put in to produce a high-performance device despite this statement on the website:
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There is nothing high resolution or high definition here. I suspect this device was designed by some other company for Audioengine. If so, I hope they put pressure on them to produce a version 2 that really performs. They can even move up the price to $199 and still be good if it produced the performance of a $9 Apple headphone dongle.
As is, I can't recommend the Audioengine B-Fi based on objective performance.
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