John Darko
Let’s talk about display screens on hi-fi components: they are what we look at when we want to know, at a glance, what song or artist is playing and (optionally) the source album, the stream’s resolution, track progress and volume level. On a more fundamental level, screens give us a focal point whilst listening to music that arrives over the air, shorn of its artwork, booklet and tangibility.
During the last decade, full-colour displays have become commonplace on streaming DACs and amplifiers — but they aren’t all alike. Some are touch-sensitive and some are not.
Three that aren’t:
The Naim Uniti Atom offers a full-colour display that isn’t touch-sensitive. We use the large rotary on top to change the volume with the front panel buttons taking care of input selection and play/pause. The Cambridge EVO 150 relies on physical buttons for play/pause, a rotary encoder for volume changes and then a secondary rotary encoder ring for input selection; like the Naim, the screen is only there to provide visual feedback on top of the artwork and metadata. The Audiolab 9000A integrated amplifier and 9000N streaming DAC have just arrived at my Berlin apartment. They too have full-colour display screens that aren’t touch-sensitive — the front panel rotaries (which also have a ‘push’ mechanism) are used for play/pause, to change the volume and to navigate each device’s internal menu system.
In the past five years, we’ve seen numerous hifi products come to market with display touch in tow: NAD’s M10, M33 and M66, Eversolo’s DMP-A6 and DMP-A8 and FiiO’s R7 and R9. And one of the more obvious trends of Munich High-End 2024 was manufacturers leaning into touchscreens in a big way. I’m talking about the WiiM Ultra, the Shanling M1.3, the Volumio Motivo and the Arcam SA45.
Touchscreens can lend hi-fi products a ‘wow’ factor — a sense of technological advancement that gives them an apparent edge over the competition. They also permit the removal of physical control buttons for fewer possible points of failure and/or a minimalist aesthetic. One example is NAD’s M10, currently in V2 status. Our only hands-on control comes via the front-panel touchscreen where we find no rotaries or buttons.
Used in tandem with an Android operating system, touchscreens can also give us access to a broader range of streaming apps. Most notably, Apple Music. Before the Eversolo DMP-A6 and FiiO R7 – that put the Apple Music app on the device itself – we’d send an Apple Music stream to a Google Chromecast- or Apple AirPlay-equipped endpoint. However, Google Chromecast isn’t gapless and Apple Music streams travel through the smartphone en route to the streaming endpoint. Salting that wound, Apple Music re-encodes all streams destined for AirPlay 2 endpoints with lossy AAC, irrespective of the end user’s desire for CD-quality or hi-res content. We made a video about that issue last year.
The Eversolo DMP-A6 and FiiO R7 connect an Android operating system to a touchscreen for hi-fi products that work like smartphones. If we’re using the FiiO, we can install any streaming app from the Google Play Store because the Google Play Store is baked into the OS. The Eversolo runs a heavily customised version of Android with no Google Play Store. Instead, we install streaming apps from an on-device white list. And if our chosen app isn’t yet whitelisted, we can try our luck with sideloading the app’s .apk file.
So, if full-colour display screens 1) give us something to look at whilst listening, 2) provide at-a-glance access to useful information and 3) broaden streaming app accessibility, you might rightfully wonder: where’s the beef?
I want to detail three possible issues with display screens (touch or not) before suggesting a better – and maybe cheaper – way to make a stream’s artwork, metadata, resolution, progress bar and volume level more plainly visible to the listener.
SCREEN SIZE
My first concern comes in the form of a question: what use is a screen showing covert art and artist/album if it is so small that we have to squint to read it from the listening position? As I write this, I am trying – and failing – to read the volume level from the Grimm MU2’s 3.5″ front panel display. When most screens measure only a few inches across, only the most basic information can be drawn large enough to be read from the listening position, which typically is at least six feet away. The NAD M10 V2’s screen measures 7″ across its diagonal. The Cambridge Audio EVO150 measures the same. Naim’s Uniti Atom is only a 5-incher. An iPhone 14 Pro Max has a 7” screen. So too does the Galaxy S24 Ultra. Would you place either of those smartphones under your TV, activate a streaming app’s now-playing screen and try to read it from the sofa? I wouldn’t. And it’s not only a matter of size…
SCREEN ORIENTATION
In 2020, we were introduced to Hifi Rose who put touchscreens across the full width and height of its full-width streaming products. Last year’s flagship transport – the RS130 – boasts a 15″ touchscreen to partially address my concerns about listening chair visibility while simultaneously introducing a second concern: the screen’s aspect ratio.
The RS130’s screen measures 1920 pixels across but only 382 pixels in the vertical (aka ‘extreme widescreen’) to render the UI far wider than tall and go beyond what we would experience when turning a smartphone to a landscape viewing mode.
However, it was Eversolo’s DMP-A6 that kicked down the door on touchscreen-equipped streaming DACs selling for under $1000. Despite the DMP-A6 running an extreme widescreen UI like the Hifi Rose, it was still 2023’s hottest hi-fi product. The only manufacturer (that I know of) to tackle the extreme widescreen conundrum head-on is FiiO whose R7 and R9 have portrait-oriented touchscreen displays and whose headphone amplifier point to one area where touchscreen products make the most sense: the desktop.
The hi-fi market demands low-profile products that can slip onto a shelf in a hi-fi rack or sit unobtrusively sit atop a low board or TV console. The majority of hifi components – screen-loaded or not – top out at 12cm tall and 43cm wide. Ultra-widescreen aspect ratios are baked into a traditional hifi component’s design brief and putting a 9:16 screen on the front panel would render it too small to be usable. And too far away…
SCREEN LOCATION
If a streaming DAC or amplifier sits in a hi-fi rack or on a low board, it’s not close to eye level once we’re standing in front of it. Even if our touchscreen component enjoys top-shelf treatment, we still have to bend down to get hands-on with the UI. I’m 2m tall but even those of average height would have to stoop to some degree. That’s fine for a momentary action like a volume turn or play/pause button press but browsing Apple Music takes minutes not moments. Time to pull up a chair.
Eversolo’s Cast app helps us counteract this problem by mirroring the DMP-A6’s display on our smartphone with a single button press. That’s clever! FiiO’s Control app works similarly but with a more obvious interface lag. That’s still clever — but it brings our location-related concerns back to the couch. When sat in the listening position, a hi-fi product’s touchscreen is over there but our smartphone is right here. If we can touch a smartphone app to select and play music – or directly access the unit’s settings panel – why do we need touch control on the device itself?
I don’t have the answers but I thought it worth polling the Darko.Audio YouTube audience to see what they thought about touch/screens on hi-fi products:
Two things stand out in the results:
- more poll respondents favour no screen at all over a touchscreen
- The vast majority of poll respondents – almost 80% – are either indifferent to the presence of a screen or indifferent to it being touch-sensitive
I prefer to browse Apple Music on the Apple TV app than – desktop aside – the front of a FiiO or Eversolo. Why? The couch is more comfortable than the floor in front of the lowboard that hosts my streaming hardware. An Apple TV’s HDMI output puts cover art and artist/album info on a 55” Samsung Frame TV. This setup gives me something that no hifi component can: an enormous now playing screen that I can easily read (without glasses!) from the listening position.
No, the Apple TV doesn’t give me anything above 48kHz – so no hi-res for me. 🤷🏻♂️ And no, the result isn’t bit-perfect because the Samsung TV’s OS resamples everything to 48kHz. 🤷🏻♂️ An AV receiver would get me around the bit-perfect issue (but not the lack of hi-res); and I won’t do that because I’m not a bit-perfect idealist when casually streaming music in this manner.
However, such talk of HDMI outputs and TVs points us to an alternative future for ‘now playing’ screen display and an idea for hi-fi product developers of the future:
Rather than putting cover art and metadata display on the product’s small screen – that we can barely read from the listening position – or making that screen touch-sensitive – functionality which we already have on a more easily accessible smartphone or tablet – why not divert those screen funds to add an HDMI output that pipes the unit’s now playing info into a nearby TV or computer monitor?
Another set of poll results tells us that 70% of the Darko.Audio YouTube community have a TV sitting between their main hi-fi speakers:
And if you think that an HDMI output sounds ‘out there’, know that the FiiO R9 already has this functionality baked into its design; as do most AV receivers where touchscreens have failed to take hold of manufacturer feature sets. Now, that’s interesting.
