John Darko
I want to name the best hi-fi products of 2024 — but who am I kidding? Per October’s YouTube short, if we’re going to consider what’s ‘best’, we really gotta ask: “best for whom?“. We are all different people with different needs, disposable incomes and sonic/aesthetic tastes. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all ‘best’ in any area of hi-fi. There isn’t even a one-size-fits-most.
Moreover, from a publisher’s point of view, calling ‘best’ is to hang one’s headline on a misdirect: that a single reviewer – or committee of reviewers – has tested every product in a single category and, if we’re lucky, at various price points. Any hi-fi publication worth its salt knows this will never happen, especially when most reviewers work part-time, limiting how many products they can cover in one year. And they do so underneath editors who, in the main, satisfy their audiences with coverage of a range of products at a broad range of price points.
Unfortunately, the internet’s increasingly heavy lean on short-cut culture means this B-word isn’t going away any time soon. The majority of readers want to know only about the destination. They’ve little interest in the journey. Every publisher knows – and jokes about it behind closed doors – that dropping ‘best’ into an article headline or video title pulls in more eyeballs than when it’s bypassed in favour of more sober phrasing. (Kindly watch Veritsasium’s video on ‘Clickbait’ before you reach for that accusation). You can’t blame us though: why wouldn’t we want our work read (or viewed) by as many people as possible? No, ‘best’ proliferates because readers/viewers can’t stop clicking it.
So — when I say best, I mean favourite. My favourite hifi products for 2024 were chosen on merit and my predilection for (what I call) Future-Fi. This is the first of three…
Moondrop’s MIAD-01 is a 5G-capable smartphone designed explicitly for audiophiles. And no, this phone doesn’t come from a third-party supplier. The Chinese company makes it in-house.
MIAD is short for “Mobile Internet Audio Device”. The shell is all plastic and the display – a 120Hz 1080p OLED panel – is very nice to look at. However, I have reservations about the screen’s rounded edges, which occasionally cause in-pocket movement to be misread as a finger swipe or a click. Underneath the screen sits a fingerprint reader which misses only occasionally. I remember the Google Pixel 6 Pro’s fingerprint reader as far more unreliable.
It wouldn’t be a modern-day smartphone without front and rear-facing cameras. The rear camera’s protruded housing means the MIAD-01 isn’t all that comfortable to hold for all but a few moments. Heading any criticism of its photos off at the pass, Moondrop has written on its website that the camera is “not good but it works”. I think they’re selling themselves short. The photo quality isn’t great in the way that photos spilling from the Asus Zenfone 10 or the Sony Xperia 1 V are great. But they are still OK — as long as the lighting is decent. Nighttime photos are much more of a mixed bag.
The Android 13 operating system runs on an 8-core Mediatek Dimensity 7050 chip and 12GB of LPDDR4X RAM. Western buyers should enable Google Services in the settings to activate the Google Play Store. This gives us access to our favourite streaming apps without needing to sideload an .apk.
For anyone rocking a microSD card full of FLACs and/or MP3s, the MIAD-01 has a slot for you inside the SIM tray. Otherwise, we are restricted to 256 GB of internal storage to host our FLAC collection or offlined streaming service content. One key advantage of using streaming apps like Tidal and Apple Music to manage our portable music collections is that offline content can come and go (and return) with the click of a button, even with Plexamp and Roon ARC. The latter’s ‘Opra’ DSP now offers some very natty headphone correction.
Moondrop says the MIAD-01’s 5000mAH internal battery will run for up to 27 hours between charges. I say otherwise: in my testing, I was lucky to hit 16 hours. Sony DAPs aside, that’s still more than your average portable audio player. On the upside, the MIAD-01 takes just over an hour to fully recharge from empty.
Why did I just mention DAPs? Like LG’s V Series of smartphones (RIP), the MIAD-01 has been designed for those who care about the sound quality of their wired headphones. In the MIAD-01, this means a full Android SRC bypass for bit-perfect digital signal handling and a D/A converter built around a pair of Cirrus Logic chips. That DAC circuit outputs via a choice of two headphone sockets: a 3.5mm single-ended socket and – my preference – a 4.4mm balanced socket. According to Moondrop, we get up to 250mW per channel — an upper limit that I assume applies to the balanced output only.
On sound quality, the MIAD-01 runs rings around the Sony Xperia 1 V (and probably the Mark VI). It better separates instrumental layers to make music sound more internally spacious and bigger in all directions. There’s a commanding heft to the sound that I don’t hear from the long-discontinued LG V40, which, by contrast, sounds slightly reedier.
Each time I pick up this smartphone to listen to music – usually via the Campfire or Sennheiser IEMs – I find myself amazed at how lovely it sounds. The MIAD-01 is especially adept at keeping the IE900’s lively top end on a tighter leash to make music sound more dynamically muscular and more ‘beautiful’ than any dongle DAC (that I’ve) applied to the Sony Xperia 1 V or the Asus Zenfone 10.
There’s enough on offer here soundwise to turn my back on DAPs for the foreseeable future. Yes, I know I said in 2018 that ‘the DAP days were over’ – but that was before the majority of DAP manufacturers moved to smartphone-like Android operating systems with Google Play Store access or, at the very least, a white list of installable apps. Frustratingly, Astell&Kern’s Roon ARC app no longer starts for me on the SP3000 (and I don’t know why).
The only reason the MIAD-01 isn’t my daily driver smartphone is that Google Maps can’t find my location. My Moondrop contact says his software team is aware of the issue and is working on a fix to be included in the next OTA firmware update (ETA TBC).
In the meantime, it might be helpful to frame the MIAD-01 as a DAP with smartphone functionality — and despite its shortcomings, it’s operating in a field of one. The Moondrop is a smartphone that severely blunts the need for an interceding dongle DAC or separate portable player. That’s reason enough to crown the MIAD-01 as one of my favourite audio products of 2024/25.
Further information: Moondrop
