Wanted to love this product as it’s beautifully designed and looks really cool. I was ready to go all in and buy a leather case for it to make it look like a canteen, but the sound of this device didn’t agree with me. On the surface, the sound signature is much like other iFi products: warm, chocolatey, buttery smooth, but with punch (when bass boost is activated), great imagining, but a bit lacking in detail compared to Sabre/AKM DACs. What ultimately made me return this unit was the lack of adjustment on the bass boost feature. With bass boost turned off (Xbass as it’s called here), the sound is way too bass lite, but when I put it on, it sounds far better but it’s also too much and on certain passages of music (electronic, pop I mainly listen to) it sounds too boomy and bloated. The iFi Zen Dac gives you the option to choose between low and high bass boost, this unit however only lets you choose between on or off. The iFi Go Blu (which also offers Xspace) has a much more subtle implementation of Bass boost that for me worked well. This Hip Dac ought to be a step up from that product and offer you as much or more flexibility in terms of that but it doesn’t. I found myself having to choose between too much bass or no bass at all. If this product simply provided a low vs high option, it would have been a keeper for me, but for the price it’s too limited on features compared to the GoBlue and the bass boost compared to that product I found to be too overbearing. If iFi could make it so that the bass boost button could clicked a few times to switch between a low mode and a high mode for bass boost, that would make me reconsider one of these in the future.