About me: I’m 39 years old. I do have some hearing loss and suffer from mild tinnitus. I’m a metal head and listen all forms of hard rock to extreme metal. I’ve always liked music, but just recently got into more hi-end audio and equipment. Enough about me, on to the review.
What you get: As usual, you get a neatly packed amp/DAC with lots of accessories. To hit the highlights, you get some silicon pads for stacking and a small interconnect cable (1" long and perfect). You also get a good instruction manual, charging cable, and a couple of bands for stacking.
The review: I ordered the Q1 from Amazon and it arrived without issues. My soul purpose for buying an amp was to extend the battery life of my X3II. I do not own any hard to drive headphones and I was extremely happy with the sound of the X3II by itself. Where I was running into issues was when I use my OTG setup a few times a week and this takes anywhere from one to three hours off my battery life of my X3II depending on what OTG device I am using. I'd have enough juice to use it at work all day, but no juice left if I wanted to listen when I would get home.
As you've figured out by now, I stacked the Q1 with my X3II using the FiiO stacking kit. For this review, I used my Grado SR60e and Sennheiser HD558 headphones. The Grados are 38 Ohms and the HD558 are 50 Ohms so the X3II alone was able to drive them without issues. The differences between these headphones is pretty clear, but I need to hit the cliff notes for those not familiar. The HD558 are warm sounding, somewhat analytical, great sound stage, and little to no bass (it's there, but only shows up depending on the track). The Grados are a little cooler sounding, smaller sound stage, punchy bass, and fairly detailed sounding. Both sets of cans paired well with the X3II alone, but sounded completely different.
Once I got everything stacked together, I switched the Q1 on and plugged in my Grados. I used various genres of metal music (traditional, thrash, death, etc.). The bass boost switch was off when I began listening and I was not impressed with the sound. It was dry, bland, boring, and so on. I thought it just sounded terrible like this and was very disappointed. I honestly considered boxing this thing up and sending it back because it made things sound worse in my opinion. I tried low and high gain and had the same results. It was at that time I decided to give the bass boost a try. I flipped the switch and suddenly I was hearing what I wanted to hear. The bass boost gave the music body. It didn't make things muddy, but instead added life to it. To me, it was a night and day difference between the sound with the switch on or off. The Grados already had punchy bass from the X3II, but now it was punchy even at lower volumes and impact was greater. I didn't notice a difference in the sound stage because the Grados don't have a huge one to begin with. I did not notice a loss in detail, nor any gain either. The bass boost just adds some coloration that appealed to me and made the overall sound very pleasing. I found the low gain setting plenty for my needs and noticed no sound difference between high and low gain when volume was matched.
After a week, I decided to give my HD558 a go with the Q1. I used the same music and I have to say I was very surprised. With the bass boost off, once again it was just boring and did nothing for me, but I had to try for the purposes of this review. After I got that out of the way, I flipped the switch again. What I got here was the Q1 cooled the HD558 sound down which to me was a good thing and gave it some richness that just wasn't there before. I even got some bass to show up more than what I was experiencing before. I got a little punch that was missing and every now and then you could feel some impact (which wasn't there before at all). I really couldn't tell a difference in the sound stage, but once again the Q1's coloration was very pleasing to me with these headphones as well. I've found myself listening to this set of headphones a lot more now since I really enjoy the sound of them with the Q1.
As of this review, I have not used the DAC of the Q1. The X3II is my primary listening device and I've never even used the DAC in it. If I get around to that, I will add my thoughts to this review.
If anyone is interested, I'm getting right around 14.5 hours of use out of my X3II just playing MP3s. I get 11 hours using my Sandisk 128gig OTG flash drive and nine hours when using my Transcend OTG card reader.
My only gripe about the Q1 is that bass boost switch. I feel they could have just made the Q1 without it. This is just my opinion, but I think others will agree with me that the sound of the Q1 with the bass boost off is useless. It should have just been built sounding like it does with the bass boost on and no switch. I know someone will disagree, but until you hear it for yourself, please refrain from commenting.
What you get: As usual, you get a neatly packed amp/DAC with lots of accessories. To hit the highlights, you get some silicon pads for stacking and a small interconnect cable (1" long and perfect). You also get a good instruction manual, charging cable, and a couple of bands for stacking.
The review: I ordered the Q1 from Amazon and it arrived without issues. My soul purpose for buying an amp was to extend the battery life of my X3II. I do not own any hard to drive headphones and I was extremely happy with the sound of the X3II by itself. Where I was running into issues was when I use my OTG setup a few times a week and this takes anywhere from one to three hours off my battery life of my X3II depending on what OTG device I am using. I'd have enough juice to use it at work all day, but no juice left if I wanted to listen when I would get home.
As you've figured out by now, I stacked the Q1 with my X3II using the FiiO stacking kit. For this review, I used my Grado SR60e and Sennheiser HD558 headphones. The Grados are 38 Ohms and the HD558 are 50 Ohms so the X3II alone was able to drive them without issues. The differences between these headphones is pretty clear, but I need to hit the cliff notes for those not familiar. The HD558 are warm sounding, somewhat analytical, great sound stage, and little to no bass (it's there, but only shows up depending on the track). The Grados are a little cooler sounding, smaller sound stage, punchy bass, and fairly detailed sounding. Both sets of cans paired well with the X3II alone, but sounded completely different.
Once I got everything stacked together, I switched the Q1 on and plugged in my Grados. I used various genres of metal music (traditional, thrash, death, etc.). The bass boost switch was off when I began listening and I was not impressed with the sound. It was dry, bland, boring, and so on. I thought it just sounded terrible like this and was very disappointed. I honestly considered boxing this thing up and sending it back because it made things sound worse in my opinion. I tried low and high gain and had the same results. It was at that time I decided to give the bass boost a try. I flipped the switch and suddenly I was hearing what I wanted to hear. The bass boost gave the music body. It didn't make things muddy, but instead added life to it. To me, it was a night and day difference between the sound with the switch on or off. The Grados already had punchy bass from the X3II, but now it was punchy even at lower volumes and impact was greater. I didn't notice a difference in the sound stage because the Grados don't have a huge one to begin with. I did not notice a loss in detail, nor any gain either. The bass boost just adds some coloration that appealed to me and made the overall sound very pleasing. I found the low gain setting plenty for my needs and noticed no sound difference between high and low gain when volume was matched.
After a week, I decided to give my HD558 a go with the Q1. I used the same music and I have to say I was very surprised. With the bass boost off, once again it was just boring and did nothing for me, but I had to try for the purposes of this review. After I got that out of the way, I flipped the switch again. What I got here was the Q1 cooled the HD558 sound down which to me was a good thing and gave it some richness that just wasn't there before. I even got some bass to show up more than what I was experiencing before. I got a little punch that was missing and every now and then you could feel some impact (which wasn't there before at all). I really couldn't tell a difference in the sound stage, but once again the Q1's coloration was very pleasing to me with these headphones as well. I've found myself listening to this set of headphones a lot more now since I really enjoy the sound of them with the Q1.
As of this review, I have not used the DAC of the Q1. The X3II is my primary listening device and I've never even used the DAC in it. If I get around to that, I will add my thoughts to this review.
If anyone is interested, I'm getting right around 14.5 hours of use out of my X3II just playing MP3s. I get 11 hours using my Sandisk 128gig OTG flash drive and nine hours when using my Transcend OTG card reader.
My only gripe about the Q1 is that bass boost switch. I feel they could have just made the Q1 without it. This is just my opinion, but I think others will agree with me that the sound of the Q1 with the bass boost off is useless. It should have just been built sounding like it does with the bass boost on and no switch. I know someone will disagree, but until you hear it for yourself, please refrain from commenting.
@pauliunas, I wouldn't say it adds bass so much as it adds a coloration without diminishing the other frequencies. The best way I can describe it is that it just adds body and richness, yet still maintains the mids and highs. I hope that makes sense. I'm not a bass head, but like the impact of a bass drum or the pounding of the double bass drum and this amp does bring that out, but it's not bloated or booming. It just adds some more punch and impact. This is why I sometimes hate describing sound, but I would recommend hearing it for yourself to see where I am coming from.