DAC rate indicators
Which USB DACs show the rate they receive?
Some do, and hardly any of them show it as a number. The usual readout is one small indicator that changes colour with the sample-rate band arriving over the cable, which is the DAC's own account of what its USB receiver locked onto. Of the three dongles we hold published receipts for, the Fosi DS2 is the one whose maker documents that behaviour: its instruction page lists red below 48 kHz, green from 48 to 96 kHz, yellow above 96 kHz, and blue for DSD.
That single light answers a question the phone will not. Put on a 44.1 kHz album and the DS2 should sit in its red band. If it goes green instead, the DS2 is receiving something between 48 and 96 kHz, which means a rate conversion happened somewhere between the file and the cable.
What a readout is actually telling you
A colour band is a report from the far end of the cable, and reports are worth having. Your player says what it thinks it sent; the DAC says what it thinks it got. When those two disagree, you have learned something real about your setup in about four seconds, with no test gear.
It is also coarse. A band tells you 44.1 kHz from 96 kHz and nothing finer, it usually says nothing about bit depth, and it says nothing at all about the content of the bytes. A DAC receiving 96 kHz of quietly resampled audio lights exactly the same colour as one receiving 96 kHz that nothing touched.
The three DACs we hold receipts for
| DAC | Does it show you the incoming rate? | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Fosi DS2 | Yes, as a colour band on the indicator: red below 48 kHz, green 48 to 96 kHz, yellow above 96 kHz, blue for DSD. | Fosi's own DS2 user instruction page |
| Qudelix 5K | Monitoring lives in the companion apps rather than on the unit. Qudelix says the apps "monitor the real-time status of 5K, including battery, bitrate, volume, RMS, and other helpful information," and its USB page says "5K supports 96KHZ/24-bit USB audio streaming." Whether that status view names the incoming USB sample rate: unverified — check before publishing. | qudelix.com |
| Jcally JM6 Pro | Unverified — check before publishing. We could not find a page published by JCALLY itself describing a rate indicator on this dongle, so we do not claim one either way. | none found |
Those three are here because they are the three with published receipts on this site. It is not a survey of the dongle market, and there is no compatibility list here assembled from spec sheets, because a spec sheet says what hardware can do and a receipt says what happened.
Why the rate is worth watching at all
By default, Android resamples your music to 48 kHz. Plugging in a good dongle does not by itself change that, and nothing on screen tells you it happened, because resampled audio still sounds like music. You can own capable hardware, play a 44.1 kHz album, and have 48 kHz arrive at the other end of the cable all evening.
A DAC's own indicator is the cheapest instrument for catching that, and most people asking this question already own one. It costs nothing and it does not take the app's word for anything.
Neither end of the cable proves the other
We publish hashes of what Meringo sent, and we print the limit of that proof on the registry in the same breath: "it covers everything Meringo sent. Isochronous USB carries no delivery acknowledgement… so no software on any platform can prove what the DAC received, only what was put on the wire for it."
The readout does not close that gap from the other side. It is still a report, generated by the DAC about itself, and no dongle we know of verifies delivery of anything. What you get is two accounts of the same second of audio taken from opposite ends of a cable. When they agree, that is worth more than either one alone; when they disagree, you have a bug worth chasing.
Checking a dongle you already own
Two files and a minute:
- Find a 44.1 kHz track and a 96 kHz track. Any lossless album and any hi-res album will do.
- Play each one and watch the indicator, or the maker's companion app if the readout lives there. If the display never moves between the two, either that DAC has no rate readout or both tracks are arriving at the same rate.
- If it never moves and you want to know which, take the capture route below.
For a DAC with no readout at all, the hash is the fallback. Arm Verified Capture in Settings, Audio Diagnostics: Meringo writes every byte it hands to the isochronous pipe and computes a SHA-256 over the whole stream, then re-decodes the same file, lays the PCM out in the identical format and hashes that. Matching hashes mean nothing resampled, requantised, or otherwise touched a bit between the file and the pipe. You can recompute the result with ffmpeg and sha256sum; the method and a public-domain checker script that shares no code with the app are published at meringo.app/verify.
If your capture disagrees with ours, send it in. NOT BIT-IDENTICAL and INCONCLUSIVE are both published verdicts, and every verdict is welcome.
What we do not claim
We hold receipts for three DACs. If yours is not one of them, we do not know that it runs bit-perfect, and we will not say that it does.
We do not claim that any DAC verifies what it received. A readout is the device's own report about its own input, which makes it useful and does not make it proof.
Meringo is PCM-first and does not play DSD natively on-device, so the DS2's blue band is not a state this app will put it into from a local DSD file. DoP passthrough exists for capable external DACs; we have not captured it on this one.
Meringo is also the wrong player for you if you mainly stream from Spotify, Tidal or Qobuz. There is no native integration with commercial streaming, by design.