Dossier — TimeEar BTE-9
The brochure speaks; the silicon answers. What follows is what each has said.
+ Vendor page › +Claims breakdown
| Claim | Bucket | Witnessed | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| The vendor's product page does not enumerate sample rate, bit depth, DSD support, or USB Audio Class version. | Silent | Alt 1, Subslot 3 — 24-bit PCM. Sample Rates Supported (kHz): 44.1 48 88.2 96 | — Silent: claims unwitnessable by descriptor |
Remarks
TimeEar publishes the BTE-9 as a wireless companion — a Bluetooth receiver built on the Qualcomm QCC5125 radio, feeding a CS43198 DAC and dual ESS9603 amplifiers to a wired output. The product page names those parts but enumerates no USB-audio specification: no bit depth, no sample rate, no DSD claim, no USB Audio Class. There is nothing marketed to weigh, so nothing is weighed.
The descriptor alone speaks — and it says something worth pausing on. What was witnessed is a UAC1 input at 24-bit, 44.1 / 48 / 88.2 / 96 kHz: a ceiling that lands precisely on LDAC's envelope. The chip presenting this USB interface is the Bluetooth radio, not the DAC — so we suspect what was captured is the wireless pipeline's wired face rather than a dedicated USB-DAC path. Independent reviews describe that dedicated mode as capping lower still, on the order of 16-bit / 48 kHz.
With no vendor specification, and no witnessed descriptor of that second mode to set against it, the Concordance renders no verdict here. It records what it saw, names what it suspects, and stays silent on the rest.
+ See the full Concordance +