My Video Review: After a long and stressful 2020, xDuoo started a fresh new year stronger than ever. In January they already revealed several cool new devices such as Link2 USB dongle, some tube-based MT-601 and MT-602 headphone amplifiers, the lady in red TA-10R came next, followed by their …

My Video Review: Gustard proved multiple times that good digital audio runs through their veins. X26 PRO was a huge surprise that I didn’t see coming, outperforming pretty much every oversampling delta/sigma DAC I’ve tried at my place…except for one unit that I’m using for quite some time now. The …

My Video Review: The most secretive and mysterious DAC manufacturer from China is surely Gustard. They aren’t amazing when it comes to web design, they aren’t that great when it comes to marketing, they still struggle putting their drivers online, they aren’t very talkative in a language other …

My Video Review: I like the most about xDuoo is that they are not copying anyone, just look at all their portfolio. They are still releasing plenty of tube-based amplifiers, hybrids for the most part so that harder to drive headphones would perform well. They are very much into transistor-based …

My Video Review: Making good sounding digital audio players (DAP) takes time, dedication and a lot of experimentation, but making great sounding players is pure passion mixed with madness that can take years of polish until perfection is being achieved. Portable players of any kind took a huge …

My Video Review: Two years ago, I was posting my first written review on this website and my first video over Youtube for the xDuoo TA-10 DAC and hybrid headphone amplifier. I had plenty of experience with tube amplifiers and DACs, but I have never tested an xDuoo tube amplifier until that point. …

My Video Review: Hey folks. Today is big day, as I will be testing a mammoth of a unit that packs a serious punch and costs as much as an entry level interconnect cable. What it is exactly? Well…it’s a single ended and a balanced DAC, it has full MQA support and by that, I mean a full-MQA unfolder …

My Video Review: When FiiO embraced the future putting USB Type-C ports on their Q3, it was only a matter of time when the same would happen to their upper echelon portable units. Q5S was still their flagship portable DAC/Amp, but it was plagued by an aging Micro-USB port and by the Lightning only …

My Video Review: Can you guess which is my favorite DAC manufacturer from Asia? That’s right folks, that’s Topping… and if you are asking yourself why? It’s a cumulus of multiple factors: Build quality and aesthetics are first, feature set comes second, price point comes next and most importantly …

My Video Review: I still remember the craze Audioquest started several years ago with the introduction of their Dragonfly line-up. The idea was very simple: transforming your OTG capable smartphone into an audiophile quality source that could drive higher-quality headphones, without a need of a …

My Video Review: When FiiO released their portable Q5S portable DAC and headphone amp combo some time ago, people that were serious about portable Hi-Fi were ditching their award-winning Chord Mojo and were jumping into the Chi-Fi bandwagon. Why would you do that you might ask. Mojo was noisy near …

My Video Review: A lot of people don’t know but in Asia often times audio engineers are working on multiple projects of different audio manufacturers. Remember the Musician Audio and Denafrips fiasco? Well, that is common practice in Asia and shouldn’t be considered as bad practice. If you check …

My Video Review: I have a pretty long history of reviewing Matrix Audio gear. My first ever review was for their beautiful New Mini-i that I’ve done in the July of 2014. I felt in love with its form factor, with its smooth clean lines and with its beautiful OLED screen. It borrowed some design …

My Video Review: One of the most mysterious DAC manufacturers from China is surely S.M.S.L Audio. We already tested some products made by them, more exactly 3 DACs, a headphone amplifier and an integrated amplifier. Funny thing is that most of them looked so different, that I would never guess …

My Video Review: About a month ago I’ve tested an affordable true-balanced ESS-Sabre DAC that also happened to be the best sounding entry-level unit I ever stumbled upon. Soncoz LA-QXD1 simply ticked all the boxes for me, it sounded marvelously close to mid-range DACs that I’ve felt the urge to …

My Video Review: I’m a curious person by nature and when a music making machine lands on my table, I usually try to understand it first. I would pop its case and I will follow the signal path from inputs to outputs. I would always seek limitations and compromises put in place mostly by cost, …

My Video Review: At the end of 2019 I was given the honors for a world-premiere Burson Conductor 3 Reference review, which changed the way I am looking at ESS Sabre-based DACs/Preamps and headphone amp combos. From linear, lean sounding and straight as a line in terms of frequency response, …

My Video Review: When an established audio manufacturer from China is releasing its newest flagship DAC, they are targeting not only its competition from the West, but more often they are aiming they own brethren from the East. Remember the waves Topping did with their D90 DAC? That happened …

My Video Review: When it comes to digital audio, the last two years were turbulent, restless but also exciting and rewarding. Few years ago, high-end digital audio meant shelving big amounts of cash, eating less pudding and more bread and water. Yet for the last two years or so, I’ve experienced …

My Video Review: I just counted that in the last 18 months I have covered slightly more than 45 digital sources on this website, somebody called me DACman privately over social media for obvious reasons. That made me giggle but also question myself if indeed there is a DAC problem buried deep in …

My Video Review: Delta-Sigma pulse modulation DACs (D/S from now on) are approaching its peak right now, challenging the best audio analyzers on the planet and our hearing abilities. Multi-thousand dollars DACs of the past are outperformed nowadays by units that are costing less than $1K. You …

My Video Review: When I finished my FiiO BTR5 review, I was so impressed by its performance and overall sound quality in both wired and wireless mode that I immediately sent an email and a tweet to FiiO, literally begging for a DAP the size of M5 or slightly bigger, without any wireless …

My Video Review: When my Topping D90 review went live and dropped here, it literally dropped like a bomb, our bandwidth was barely keeping-up, servers were barely holding together, I never expected having so many readers. To this day, it was read more than 60.000 times, it is still my most read …

My Video Review: Once I started testing a lot of digital sources from all over Asia, few of our readers suggested testing some of the digital to analog converters from the Gustard team. After some research, we found that Gustard is quite popular in China, especially over Erji.net they have quite a …

My Video Review: I still remember it clearly when Audio-GD announced that they bought the latest batches of the best commercial made DAC chips from Burr-Brown, the legendary PCM1704 chips that everyone wanted to have in their digital sources. That news had a twofold effect on me. On one hand I was …

My Video Review: SMSL Audio might sound like a fairly new brand in the West, but for the East market SMSL just celebrated its 10th Anniversary and yet it feels just like a prologue for a long journey ahead for them. As a lot of brands from the land of the red dragon, SMSL is focused mostly on …

My Video Review: Topping is one of those brands that is just not stopping from releasing new products that cater for the affordable, mid-fi or hi-fi market. The rest of world crumbles in fear, buying toilet paper, canned food or just staying at home quarantined, yet Topping is waving hello with …

My Video Review: With the release of their entry level Digital-To-Analog-Converter Ares – which symbolizes the God Of War in Greek Mythology, Denafrips officially announced a long-term-assault and declared war to the Delta-Sigma DACs found in 99% of all your modern audio sources as smartphones, …

My Video Review: Shanling is known to be making portable digital audio players for quite some time now. M3 digital audio player that debuted in 2014 came like a storm, even at that time it had DSD playback capabilities, it had a big battery capacity, an interesting Cirrus Logic chipset, lots of …

My Video Review: You might have heard about a company from the land of the Red Dragon called Audio-GD. They are crafting anything really in the digital and analog domain. From simple DAC and headphone amp units to big and heavy integrated amps and mono-blocks. In the early days of headphone …