** UPDATE 03/2023: borrowed OPTIMO NANO & OPTIMO 3 DUO briefly: So this is OPTIMO NANO : Runs 4x LT3045, which happens to be the market-leading voltage regulator with lowest output noise, that go through 2x big caps that are most likely here to further help drop ripple and provide big buffers of voltage ready to fuel anything connected up to 2A. Fact is that the bigger the caps, the lower their load & noise and the stronger the buffering, not to mention that as much as XE USB already runs the same LT3045 chip there is no way such tall caps...

New to the DENAFRIPS DAC's, I'm currently playing around with their ARES II DAC borrowed from a friend. Much coverage has been made already but I figured I might as well post my own review As described by the other reviewer in here, there's no volume control and no remote control. It never gets hots, doesn't do any clicking noise or auto-mute between tunes so that's great. It also comes with a fuse, might seem normal but at least if it ever encounters a spike you can fix it easily and it ever malfunctions badly it'll instantly shutdown. I believe...

Hi guys, recently had the opportunity to borrow this shiny box from my local reseller and figured a review would be in good order as Yulong don't appear to get the coverage they would deserve: http://www.yulongaudio.com/pd.jsp?id=39#_pp=106_674 It's got all the bells and whistles you could think of: -latest AK4497 DAC chip -Native DSD64/128/256 + PCM 16-32bit, 32-384 KHz via XMOS-based USB -DOP64 + DOP128 through S/PDIF, Optical and AES -PCM 24bit 384KHz through S/PDIF, Optical and AES -Fully balanced decoder topology + fully balanced high...

Hi guys, I'm surprised this little gizmo isn't more discussed here on head-fi and I happen to be having a lot of fun with it so I figured a brief review in order to build a discussion here would make sense.   I've been messing with USB tweaks for quite a while now and until very recently all we had at hand were 12Mbit/s USB2 galvanic isolators but much like S/PDIF & I²S there is no free lunch to be expected from galvanic isolation and as you can tell from this link isolation does increase distortion, jitter and latency.   I now see 480MBit/s USB...

Hey guys, so I recently had the opportunity to try the E3 and I thought a review would be in good order as it seems rather clear that Asus are really nailing down the needs of the audiophile niche market with a product that would appear to have gone through quite a lot of thoughts.   First thing first, it shares the same 70's look as the STU but this picture found on google makes obvious that the E3 isn't just a STU with better chips:     Same design but the comparison stops here   Here goes for what's in the box:     It's good to see...

  So a friend of mine finally received it last week and allowed me to play around with it while he's on vacation so I could get to hear whether all the Muses hype was true(someone on another forum claimed that it killed AD797 to his ears).   Just as a short reminder, the Essence ONE runs a dual-mono design from start to end, based on two PCM1795 DAC chips(the same one you can find in many megabucks DAC units) and 11 dual opamps, as described here:    Asus clearly went as "discrete" as you can get with opamps through a fully dual-mono...