Review of Arylic BP50 Bluetooth 5.2 preamplifier with TIDAL Music

Arylic has sent us a sample of their low-cost BP50 Bluetooth 5.2 preamplifier for review. It features an ESS Saber ES9023P DAC chip and Qualcomm QCC3040 Bluetooth chip with support for aptX, aptX HD (High Definition), aptX LL (Low Latency), and aptX AD (Adaptive). It offers many input-output connections such as phono preamp MM/MC, optical, Line-in, subwoofer output, and HDMI ARC. You can find the full details about the specifications in the aforelinked announcement.

Arylic BP50 unboxing

Let’s start our review with an unboxing. Our package came with the following items:

Arylic BP50 Bluetooth 5.2 preamplifier
A 12V/1A power supply
2x Bluetooth antennas (3dBi)
A remote Control
A user manual

As a reminder, here are the ports on the back of the preamplifier as shown in a stock image from the company.

Test setup

For this review, we’ve connected the Arylic BP50 Bluetooth preamplifier’s Line-Out port to the CD Audio input port of the Anthem MRX 300 7.1 A/V receiver and used two B&W DM500-series speakers. The Anthem MRX 300 was set to Zone 2 in left-right stereo mode, the equalizer was set to FLAT without adjusting the bass and treble.

The TIDAL Music streaming app was installed on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 Lite 10.4-inch tablet and used a “TIDAL HiFi Plus” subscription supporting up to 24-bit, 192 kHz. The video/audio demos below were recorded on a Xiaomi Mi 10T Pro Android smartphone.

Other notable parameters include:

Room size – 5 x 4 x 3.5 m
Distance between speakers – 1.5 meters.
Distance from the speaker to the recording point – 1.8 meters.

Arylic BP50 review with the Tidal Music app

Our first audio test used the “Actor” song by Tong Li from his 2007 album. The song follows a classical music style from China, the singer has a unique voice that’s both sweet and sour, and traditional string instruments, such as guzheng and the zither, reflect the Chinese culture in the song. Strumming produces loud and clear sounds on every note. You’ll find the Actor song on the Tidal website with “HIGH” quality.

The second song selected for testing is “Your Man” by Josh Turner from the album Best Of streaming from the Tidal app. This is country music style with the American singer having a unique bass voice with a low, pleasing voice. The sample has “HIGH” quality on Tidal.

Next up is “Man With A Horn” Jazz song by Scott Hamilton, an American saxophonist, from the album Nocturnes And Serenades. Again, it’s a “HIGH” quality recording as shown in the TIDAL website.

The final song is “Sometimes When We Touch” by Olivia Ong from the album Voices Of Love with a Pop Jazz style from the Singaporean singer and actress. She has a clear singing accent and a beautiful voice that’s sweet, soft, and easy to listen to over and over. The audio quality is set to “MQA (Master Quality Authenticated)” on the TIDAL website.

Scores

Phon, the reviewer, gave the following scores for the Arylic BP50 preamplifier.

8.5/10 design
9.5/10 connectivity
9.0/10 sound quality
10/10 value for money

Conclusion

If you’re thinking of buying an external DAC with a budget unde $100, the Arylic BP50 Bluetooth preamplifier may be a good value proposition. It comes with built-in volume control for direct connection to active speakers, supports streaming music from internet services such as TIDAL, and features a high-quality digital output channel for potential DAC upgrades in the future.

We’d like to thank Rakiot for sending the Arylic BP50 Bluetooth 5.2 preamplifier product for review. If you’d like to order one you can do so for $99 or even lower as the company often provides coupon coupon codes for a 10 to 15% discount.,

CNXSoft: This review is a translation of the original post on CNX Software Thailand by NinePhon Kongangkab, and edited by Suthinee Kerdkaew.

Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.