I feel like having a raging drug habit would be cheaper than being an audiophile

Great Review as usual, You are the Most entertaining reviewer I've ever come across on KZfaq,

A pink doorstop. Lovely!

My kitty Lou Lou can hear 40 hz. Lou Lou is happy with my older Audio Alchemy.

Phil can hear 0.0000001% distortion.

I had plenty of fun with portable DAC/amps on my headphone journey. Started with the legendary FiiO E07K . Always thought the Diablo was ridiculous.

those hand gestures 🤣🤣

I’d love to see the 4 conductor 4.4mm jack become a widely used standard. Just what I’ve wished for many times on pro equipment to improve panel design.

Best unboxing ever.

Also I prefer eye fi to eye eff eye. Nearly got their hip flask DAC once. Looks cool.

Alan Sugar is behind all of this - A mug's eyeful comes to mind!

I don't use lossy Bluetooth for audio. Same for lossy MQA (I loved your finger wagging over the MQA symbol), but manufacturers have to add these "features" to make more sales. For me, I'll stick with my Ares II DAC and separate headphone amp for the rare occasions when I listen through headphones. Meanwhile my iFi hip-dac sits collecting dust.

Concerning a very wide frequency response someone once said, (I forget who unfortunately) “The wider you open the window, the more the muck flies in.”

What a cheap and nasty power supply!

Looks nice😊

It’s garbage. I bought one from Bloom Audio, it had all sorts of interference from nearby RF in Bluetooth mode that it was unusable. Bloom Audio even charged me a restocking fee for the defective unit. My advice? Get a FiiO Q15 instead.

You are right...I can not afford it.

I would argue that iem is the correct term when being used by a singer or musician to monitor their audio internally. My argument may also be very incorrect 😅

1300 dollars ? I just have a topping e30 connected to a battery pack for power and I love the way it sounds. Will this actually give me noticeable sound improvement?

it matches your glasses, too...

Hang on a sec! I just checked out the web page - TDK C0G (Class 1 ceramic) capacitors "They are pricey but are a perfect addition to our products." What's that's about? And this too. Panasonic OS-CON caps "They are not often found in products costing

Overpriced for its specs, for sure. Now, when it comes to ADC and DAC, in a perfect circuit (therefore, in theory) you should be able to perform the perfect encoding and reconstruction of a 22.05 kHz sine wave at Red Book spec CD Audio sample rate and word length. But reconstruction filters aren't perfect and they have a transition band that can be problematic, even if - indeed - we are talking of distortion phenomena at the very threshold or beyond the hearing abilities of most listeners. For this reason, and to alleviate the burden on having to realise near-perfect reconstruction filters, it's been deemed a good compromise (in terms of storage cost) to do ADC with an additional octave worth of wiggle room devoted to the transition band of the reconstruction filter. This compromise is 96 kHz ADC, and for good measure, extending the word length to 24 bits makes better accommodation of the human hearing's propensity to notice with more acuity, amplitude variations in quiet audio passages, than in loud passages. This non-linear perception is called mu-law and it is used in telephony systems as a companding mechanism that fits a better signal in a lower number of bits. It is often misunderstood that the intention of 24/96 digital audio is to reproduce ultrasonic (!) audio frequencies ; whereas in fact 24/96 is intended to provide a better signal processing margin for the audible range, which extends to 20 kHz in the best cases (most listeners can't hear a thing above 16 kHz). 24/96 also improves the recording and reproduction of low-frequency square waves, or wave shapes that have a lot of high-order harmonics. The ears (and loudspeakers !) will do their own low-pass filtering, but having a wee bit sharper impulse response is never a bad thing. The paradox is that, as long as you're not doing anything stupid, 24/96 is actually a cheaper way (save for storage) to achieve great audio reconstruction, than doing Red Book (16/44). As for the pipe dream of going all the way to 768 kHz, just because AKM, ESS and Burr-Brown chips can handle it ; we're well past the law of diminishing returns. Audiofools who claim they can hear this sort of stuff need counselling. Very high data rates in DAC chips were engineered to support DSD audio, but that's another story.

I would love to see you do a review of the FiiO Q15. $400 AKM equipped.

I can't afford it? I beg to differ 😂

I’m sure it’s fine enough, but I can’t get past the appearance or the price for that matter. Ifi, “turbo” and “nitro” please!

Mr Mellor, This is off- topic and may not be appropriate in this reply area. Please consider exploring an HDMI to I²S converter. Source attributed to @anadialog “How to send high-res audio from a Bluray /SACD/DVD player to a DAC via HDMI“, at or near the 6:52 mark. My use is with the Apple TV HDMI output for conversion to digital audio coax, meanwhile allowing the HDMI to pass through to the television. The audio coax is connected to an external DAC and continues with RCA cables to a 7-band tone control to finally join with the AVR aux in. Thank you for all the cold spectrograph to spectrogram analysis warmed with charming wit.

$1200 for a DAC? They've got to be kidding!!

A long time ago I Radio/TV Technician and i hat alot of costumers in HIFI audio. Mostely stupid guys who are paying alot of money for esoteric technology. It's looking pretty much tha same today. This was the reason for me to give up my job and looking für better chances with more salary. I'm still laughing about all those stupid poeple. Once one guy told me that vinyl records have a frequency response of up to 75 KHz and so it is far better than tape wich is mostely limited to about 20 KHz. Thanks for this video and go on!

Colours, I like colours. I bought my used Mojo because it had colours. They're nice, I just don't remember what they mean. What's Betty's favourite colour?

It's output power claims are essentially false unless they've updated them on the site and it's essentially the same as the old Diablo.

For that price I'd also take a look at the FiiO K19

My cheap Loxjie D40 Pro has much better specs and sounds so much better than my Schiit Yggdrasil top of the range R2R, and yes it's maybe not as nice as this one but being smart is not always related to esthetics ;-)

Nice autechre song

Isn’t a real IEM a custom made earphone, made first by pouring a putty into your ear canal then molding a hard plastic version of it, that fits exactly? Many costing $1K and up? In any case that is what musicians use. Since when did simple earbuds with a variety of rubber tips come to be called IEMs also? Those provide poor isolation and often fall out of the ear. Real IEMs never do. In fact you have to pry them out.

This is an excellent review of a product that may well be of interest to me once both of my ears are working properly. And you should consider releasing an album of your increasingly **rad** unboxing music on vinyl!!

Most things in hifi are not worth what they cost, to be good you just need to raise the price!

Ffs. So it's good sounding. For £1300 f that

I wouldnt pay £1300 for a new kidney never mind a dac, my educated guess is that dacs in the £300 range would be on par.

review the KPH40's

Most of us can afford it. Most of us are not stupid enough to buy it. Cheap Chinese nonsense.

Isn’t this DAC being used by folks for their Hifi systems? (Not headphones)

Maybe your dog needs to hear the audio. 😄

Sound is “good”? Most important quality warrants one word in the review?

Over spec'ed, over hyped, overpriced and no doubt overlooked in double blind tests!

£1299…. Someone show this guy dCS. His head will explode.

No headphones here. Hate 'em. But your review was THOROUGHLY entertaining! Thanks, again😄

I don’t think Americans understand British humor. The jokes on you…

I like this DAC very much, it's awesome, so I decided not to buy it

terrible unboxing music, but your'e very likable, so forgiven for your bad choice😂😂

I have respect for 'iFi' because one of their devices solved a noise issue for me... but why in the sweet name of f**k would they not think to include a MIDI input ( including old-skool MIDI inputs)

$130,000 for a dac? Sounds like a scam!

...and they didn't even bother to make it look decent. ugh

Tempting device. 🤔

A marketting product with a dreadful staging, sorry Sir.

what a waste of time this video is. 15 min of spec sheet reading. just go on the webside and look at the product, you will save yourrself 10 min of your life. Maybe we will have a review on this product instead of spec story time, but I won't hold my breath.

Not worth it..

One day the folks at iFi will understand sarcasm and stop sending you equipment to review 😉