- Joined
- Mar 5, 2012
- Posts
- 4,115
- Likes
- 1,433
I've had some time with this unit and I thought I'd share with you my thoughts and show you in a video. Hope you guys like it.
How loudly generally does it drive 250-ohm cans?
Do I have to open it to measure the impedance?
Nice review.
This thing's pretty good, PROVIDED you just plug it in to the computer's USB socket and leave it alone. Try using it with the optical input and a wall wart, and bit perfect solutions like ASIO or WASAPI and you'll quickly discover that this fine sounding DAC has an Achilles' heel: its firmware is absolutely dire. The drivers are internal, so I presume there's no way of upgrading it either.
The trouble is, because the driver is internal, you can't tell the DAC what it should be doing, so if it gets it wrong - which it frequently does - there's no way of sorting it out. For example, I want to listen to a ripped CD using Foobar and ASIO4ALL (which seems to be more stable than WASAPI). On my Windows 7 x64 PC, it usually detects the optical in and works first time, but sometimes I have to switch it off and on to get it to work. Irritating but never mind. Then, let's say I want to watch a YouTube vid like yours posted here. I close Foobar, and press play on YouTube. No sound. Switch off and on again and we're in business.
I have a Windows XP machine upstairs. I tried using the optical out from my Essence STX, so we have Foobar==>ASIO4ALL==>Essence==>Toslink==>D1. Nah. Won't have it at all.
So, if you're happy to just have everything going through the windows mixer with sample rate conversion to 48, and you just want to plug it in to the computer's USB and leave it alone, then you'll be fine. If you want to do ANYTHING else with it, it'll drive you round the bend!
That said, when it's working properly it sounds fantastic. It really needed configurable drivers installable on the computer; the internal ones are crap, and are too easily fooled.