Now, I'm not on a crusade to zealously defend iFi and it's certainly not perfect, but I have to point out a few things in your comment, namely:
- these THD numbers aren't the best on the market but please try and convince me how you can hear them in any way.
Eh, what kind of question is that? If that's your attitude toward audio and engineering, then what the hell are you doing looking at an portable dac/headphone amp with a 4.4mm balanced headphone output?
You should use your device's headphone jack instead, or get a cheap dongle!
The irony is that there's even sub $10 dongles that outperform a lot of iFi devices that cost 10x to 100x when it comes to noise, distortion, linearity, ...
- capable of recording? I'm pretty sure anyone (let alone iFi) can put a cheap recording chip and call it a day. Any clue why nodody puts recording chips in portable DAC?
You mean like iFi does with playback?
The irony, again, is that iFi either puts the cheapest single-digit cent chips in their devices that have poor performance while charging a premium for their devices,
or they use "expensive" (single-digit dollars) chips that would have much better performance but iFi is just too incompetent to implement them properly (i.e. use ready-to-use reference designs and follow manufacturer recommendations).
And even more irony: even sub $10 dongles support 4-pin headsets with mic, so that you can not just listen to music but also do phone calls.
And if you wanted to do more proper recording: there are very cheap audio interfaces, including portables ones, that again beat a lot of iFi devices when it comes to playback and offer good recording quality.
One more thing: everyone sensible should
boycot MQA products (like the reviewed iFi product), unless they want to
support a proprietary lossy codec baked into hardware.
Don't pay the MQA fee and
prevent future products from including this fee. Thank you.
@VSG How you can list this as a positive is beyond me.