The Modi 3 I use with my work computer bit the dust, so I decided to replace it with something a little more portable. Enter the Black Pearl: it has 10-band PEQ, it supports TRRS mic in, it's a measly 40 bucks, seems nice enough. It's built around CS43131 converters, which despite their excellent performance otherwise have been the subject of some online controversy because their power-efficient Class H operating mode can cause faint pops on some material, but the Black Pearl has been updated to let you put its amps in Class AB, avoiding the problem. Mine came with this firmware already installed.

After a week of will-they-or-won't-they deliver my package drama where AliExpress's courier said it was out for delivery for days on end, I got the package. Yay.

Physically it's a pretty standard dongle DAC. There's an LED that shows you whether it's on, in standby, playing PCM or DSD - would've been nice to have some sample rate indication to get that lil' extra zing of placebo. A glass hole on the back shows some nondescript patch of circuit board - I could do without this strange design trend.

Naturally I wanted to configure it and set up the EQ, and the paper manual curiously points you to "Please contact online customer service for instructions onhow [sic] to adjust the EQ"). Ain't got time for that. The online product page is similarly devoid of anything pointing you to how to do this. Some random internet posts pointed me to walkplay.com, where you can use a web interface to do this, or an android app offered as an APK package you have to side-load.

But not so fast - you need to register an account with either your email or phone for verification before you can configure your device. I wasn't particularly thrilled about this or the idea of sending this information to some mysterious Chinese OEM, but I fed them a burner email and waited for the verification. 20 minutes and a few attempts later, no luck. Doesn't seem like I can register on the website.

Ok, maybe let me fish an old Android phone out of a drawer and try it with the app? After few scary Android warnings about it being a "harmful app that spies on your SMS messages, photos, audio recordings, and call history" (I've got nothing on that phone, whatever) and scary-looking privacy agreements that entitle WalkPlay, whoever they are, to your name, phone number, email address, device information, etc etc, I registered an account, and could now use the web configuration interface to configure the DAC.

iOS users are out of luck - the web app is not supported. As far as I can tell, the Android app is the only way to update the device firmware, should you need to do so.

The web app is kinda janky, but basically functional. I assume the EQ presets must be stored off-device, hence the account requirements. There's no way to change/turn off EQ presets without the web app, as far as I can tell - would have been nice if one of the buttons could do this. Better hope walkplay.com doesn't turn into a 404 one day.

You will soon discover it has the strange "feature" of being completely powered down without a headphone cable being plugged in. Doesn't enumerate on USB or anything. Kind of annoying, since swapping headphones is going to confuse the OS, but ok?

Not so fast - I wanted to plug it into my audio interface to verify that the EQ was working correctly, but the pretty standard-looking 3.5mm to XLR cable I have simply would not turn it on unless I wiggled it a millimeter or two back from where it stops. The power switch seemed rather sensitive with a few other cables I had too. Not great.

This is not a problem unique to this DAC, but it also takes a moment to exit standby, so it can cut off the beginning of sound playback. I haven't been able to find a way to disable this behavior.

When it works, I guess it works fine, but this is all a little much for me. If you're not interested in the PEQ functionality, it's easier to recommend, but there are tons of cheap, capable dongles without it.

tl;dr: just get a Qudelix