I posted overnight the below comments as part of the thread posted by Peterwen, now I think that after Amirm’s review this is a better place to have these. I have made few additions.
Nice to see the device has been awarded a recommandation by Amirm.
It must be said the amplifier is a class D with analogue tone control in front of the Infineon chip and a “not top of the line” ESS DAC. It is not falling in the “full digital“ category (not a problem by itself, given overall performances).
I wonder if the outcome of the aux input measures could be associated to the NJW chip used for volume and tone control.
To complement Amirm‘s scientific findings, some personal pros and cons after few weeks of use:
+ nice display and remote.
+ nice and solid build, very good looking
+ sounds quite transparent
+ Although not advertised as part of the features, the USB input is capable of DSD decoding. (not sure max DSD frequency BTW).
+ headphone out seems not bad, tested with HifiMan Sundara. (Note: quite suprised of bad review of this section).
+ comfortable separate volume settings for speakers and headphones.
+ still completely cold after hours of use
+ cost-wise very effective
- The chi-fi trend of keeping volume value on the display very small continues...
- display does not mention actual sample rate in use, except Bluetooth.
- Bluetooth APT-X fixed at 48Khz (don’t know if this is a limit of the hardware or my iOS device)
- don’t understand the rationale of sharing the coax in and the analogue... weird engineering decision.
- don’t like eq and tone control via NJW chip. The bass and treble are disabled if you select whatever EQ setting that at the end are just tone presets. Curves resemble the classic Baxandall tone control, nothing to do with real DSP processing of other similar devices like SMSL Q5 which I prefer.
my 2 cents,
Alessandro.