I've got to say thanks for the-recommendation, really pleased to get pointed at what looks like a fantastic product, am buying one and will report back
I had not heard of Ifi, previously only trying fiio which I really liked for cheap and cheerful, but they never paid Apple to add the iDevice processing and decryption functions.
Th reviews of Ifi seem fantastic, the fact that it compares so favourably to the Chord Hugo which is over 4x the price is fantastic
I also can't bring myself to buy the Sony now, purely because they made a decision to remove the battery in Euopre which tells me they are capable of making stupid decisions and I now wonder what else they can't figure out
For anyone looking at Ifi I've read a lot on them now and the thing that jumps out is that they have a crowd source kind of approach to building the specs on their new iDSD Micro headphone DAC, as a professional product manager I love the way they have worked out wha the market will pay for then used their audio skills to excel on the musicality and definition of the sounds they aim to recreate. There are infinite arguments over what makes true sound accuracy on the DAC, but from my own DSP experience on satellite systems you find that clock purity is a huge hidden issue since it drives spectral smearing, but you need immensely expensive equipment to see inside these issues. So it's always a debate topic and people will try to rank other issues r relative to it, which is great because we all learn from each other. What caught my eye was the sub pico second jitter specs on the clocks Ifi use and I'm ready to be proved wrong but that seems unusually important.
I also read a note that there is no reconstruction filter on the bit-perfect output but I can't say I have pieced together the point here since her isa clear purpose to reconstruction, ie you need to stop the high frequency mirror images folding down to the baseband and encouraging inter modulation, but perhaps the over sampling is now so high it's irrelevant. keen to learn more since I confess I'm getting old and out of date but the Ifi story got me re-engaged with the topic, which says a lot.
final note on the comment about some companies writing down the value of imports to try to get lower tax and duty bills. Perhaps this works sometimes, but it seems risky since you don't want to put yourself in a compromised position if the Customs guys start paying you attention and worst of all, any importers that do it will be blacklisted if caught, so you need to wonder how much they value their business sticking around in the future. WHat I saw of the better looking importers was tat the well rated ones are happy to claim many years trading, show a picture of their offices and even describe how they came into being and what they do for customers.
