Micro iDSD Black Label: A Different Flavor of Review The iFi Micro iDSD Black Label is a tremendous value in a portable DAC/headphone amplifier that also very capably doubles as a DAC in a high-end home audio system. I recently had the pleasure of having two weeks with this DAC as part of...

I think you are missing a big part of what the iFi line is about. By producing units that are more single purpose focused, the company can both keep price points down and release more updates than if it were offering full all-in-one solutions. This is particularly true of the Nano and Micro...

If I had to guess, it must have been a bigger than expected challenge to produce a product in this price range that can noticeably outperform the iDSD Micro in terms of sound quality and you certainly can't come out with a "Pro" version that sounds just like your Micro version. That is even...

Does anyone have a view whether this will be the sonic equivalent of the Sonica DAC? Is there any reason to believe it could sound better than a Sonica?

If what you are suggesting were true then playing hi-res PCM, DXD or DSD files directly on the Sonica would be a waste of time as it would treat all of them the same as 16/44 and start from there. So to be clear, are you suggesting that a) an ESS/Sabre DAC doesn't treat an incoming 16/44 file...

Thanks, but that is just referring me back to my own post at Computer Audiophile. ;-))  I agree that there is a lot of complexity involved here and as far as I know there hasn't really been a good clear discussion of all that is involved.  Norton is one of the folks who prefers the internal...

Here is a quote directly from the developer of HQPlayer: "All modern DAC chips are delta-sigma designs, meaning that PCM input needs to be converted to high speed bit-stream. As said earlier, DAC chips typically convert PCM input first to 352.8 or 384 kHz PCM using a digital filter of varying...

  That just means that you likely don't fully understand what goes on inside a DAC.  Most DACs convert everything (including PCM) to DSD512 or higher internally.  What filters they use in doing so can greatly impact the music.  Using a software package that carefully lets you choose great...

  Although the overall catalog may be small here are more than 100 DSD512 titles: www.nativedsd.com/homepage/quad_dsd_music   Separately, the way that many of us use the DSD512 capability is by having software such as HQPlayer upsample everything we listen to to DSD512.  In many DACs capable...

Over at Computer Audiophile this is probably the hottest DAC on the market (the DAC8 DSD that is).  The secret seems to be feeding it DSD512 material through HQ Player or other upsampling software.  With that as an input ut seems to be besting DACs at more than twice its price and everything in...

I can't help but wonder whether the care you are putting into an otherwise "hardware complete" product argues strongly for more separation of DAC hardware from user-customizable D-to-A software.  Ultimately the rest of the signal chain and our choice of speakers will interact with whatever...

Unfortunately, I think MQA is boxing all of us into a corner.  If you subscribe to Tidal, the benefits of full MQA unfolding and decoding over the normal 16/44 bitstream are probably a sonic upgrade.  On the other hand if you are using software like HQPlayer and its superlative filters to...

Very interesting as it is not on their website and I haven't yet received my catalog.  Does it say anything about shipping status? 

Yes, the term is "vaporware" but I definately do not feel that is what iFi were doing here.  

In fairness to iFi, we don't really know how long competitors products have been on the design board as they usually don't get announced and we certainly don't get any input into their design.  I would also guess that a fair number of the ancillary products that iFi has announced over the last...

Here we are, aproaching 100 pages of thread responses and the third anniversary of this thread (started Jan 2014).  During those three years DAC technology has progressed tremendously overall.  I wonder whether iFi feels that the product they soon plan on actually making available to us will, at...

Would love to know what the LAN capabilities will be compared to the USB port.  The 105D optimized the DAC for use with USB B inputs, would be great to see this have full capabilities with Ethernet as well. 

Let me feel free to disagree....   To the extent that I think it is a safe assumption that the Sonica will feature PCM384 and DSD512 (perhaps even natively) and more and more of us are using software like HQ Player to upsample everything to DSD256 or DSD512 (so that we can then apply much...

Look out, here comes the competition (wonder which we will actually see first in the flesh, the new Oppo or the iFi Pro): The Absolute Sound just revealed the new Oppo Sonica DAC in its latest Buyer's Guide: "The new Oppo Sonica DAC improves upon the highly regarded audio performance of the...

Careful, you are standing on the edge of a rabbit's hole of information in which you could be lost for years...   I have found the easiest way to think about it in my own mind is that both processes (PCM and DSD) require further processes (like dithering and filtering) to get from the digital...

Different DAC's respond differently to upsampling.  Some, like the iFi micro and the T+A DAC8 DSD respond extremely well to pretty much everything upsampled to DSD512.  Others, like some of the Chord DACs are more specifically built to sound well with PCM input.     I don't find that the same...

Given the support that iFi is already giving to DSD512 upsampling in the iMicro, I would expect that the iPro will be more along the lines of what T+A have released in their DAC8 DSD.  It supposedly sounds exceptionally good across a range of source material when that is upsampled to DSD512...

I'll take iFi (AMR), Jussi and Brian (bmoura -- yes that Brian from NativeDSD ;-)) vs Rob Watts any day...  Actually, there seems to be growing evidence that feeding a Delta Sigma chip a DSD512 input stream and using the right filters can achieve pretty amazing results.  Rob and Chord have gone...

I have found that most folks who are "grumpy" about this haven't tried it (and in this case try usually means using it for several weeks as there is a real learning curve).  So it takes work, often quite a bit more work than plugging in a piece of hardware and sitting back and listening.  But...

MQA in theory not only benefits streaming folks but could also be embedded in downloadable digital files, so you would miss that benefit.  As to Roon, one of the great things it enables is using your computer to do additional processing (both upsampling, filtering, convolution and room response...