Last Tuesday I received the iDSD.

First contact:

Wow.

Highest quality boxing. I usually don't think much about boxing.
This boxing did catch my attention.
Keep in mind. We're talking about a <200$ product.

The boxing sets high expectations.

The iDSD, unboxed, fits into the palm. Build quality is extraordinary.

They even cover the RCA connectors with plastic caps to avoid corrosion.
Further you'll find an USB cable, RCA cables, rubber rings and rubber feet
in the box. Yep. We're still talking about a <200$ product.

The manual/flyer is almost the only thing that's rather on the lean side.
It leaves quite some questions open. Obviously Thorsten wasn't
in charge to prepare that manual. They might have ended up with a book
if he would have done it. ;)

Hook-Up.

"Squeezed" between my Cubietruck and my Hypex amps, it was time to turn it on.

Battery was factory-charged. Nice. I turned on the iDSD before booting the Cubietruck to be on exclusive battery mode (no charging, while playing).

Time to push the play button on my G2 - using the Orange Squeeze app.

Hmmh. No Sound.

I had to learn, that the iDSD needs the 5V lead of your USB connection, even if running on batteries.
I've been using an USB filter and a special homebrew cable, which cut the 5V lead for a good reason...

I got that fixed. But now I was using a rather standard USB connection.

Still No Sound.

I figured I had to adjust my squeezelite settings. My settings were still tailored to the Dragonfly, which supports 24 bit and 96 khz only. Did it and...

Pushed play. Sound. Finally!

I usually listen to certain parts of my 3-4 reference tracks. Within 2-3 minutes I'll get the picture.

I got the picture after 2-3 minutes.

Wrapped the Dragonfly and sent it back.
(I was running out of time. I had a return deadline for the Dragonfly two hours after I received the iDSD)

The iDSD sounds clean and dynamic. You can hear into the last rows and behind of an orchestra and still experience a nice very dynamic performance and separation of sounds (of percussive nature, drums etc.).
Such information got lost respectively hidden with the Dragonfly 1.2 in my setup.

The soundstage is nicely and coherent build. Basically it's all there, in the right order, without breaks in the picture and plenty of air around the sound sources. This impression continued after listening to some more test tracks.

As you can read on the web. There seems to be some more to gain if you use
separate USB powering, filtering and better cable. I'll try that later.

The volume control doesn't seem to be intrusive. A real nice way to adjust
the overall gain in your chain to avoid excessive software volume control.
I like it's implementation much better then the SW controlled analog Dragonfly VC. What's bugging me is the combined volume control/on-off
switch that forces me to readjust the volume every time I repower the iDSD.
A separate switch would have IMO been the much better solution.
This switch could have also been used to switch different power modes, such as "battery/usb/charge".
What I'd also like to see is that the iDSD goes into standby/sleep mode if the PC goes down (5V sensing). This way I wouldn't have to turn the device manually off to avoid draining the battery. There's IMO space for improvement.

One area where the Dragonfly 1.2 IMO performs better (different?) is the low end. My systems develops more energy in the bottom register with the
Dragonfly. I'm not talking about a "Boom Boom" factor here. I'm talking about clean, solid and natural bass reproduction.

Overall, the iDSD was the clear winner of the game. I didn't have to think twice about it.

I then connected the iDSD directly to my LG G2 via OTG cable.
The Android application "USB Audio Player Pro", which comes with its own USB driver, immediately recognized the device.
I pushed the button to play a flac.
Oh man. It's been very nice what I heard. I'd call it an audiophile performance @ 200 bucks. Who needs more then that? You'll have a full blown 100% battery powered stereo. Hint: Save your money investing in audiophile power supplies for your PCs, HDDs or Squeezebox Touches...

Bottom line. I'll keep the device. The Dragonfly and the M2tech USB Dac went back already.
Even my very nice sounding battery powered DIY-DACs are not able to compete sound- and pricewise with such a package.

@Thorsten. Probably you guys have taken the right strategic decisions
of how you're positioning the iFi Nano iDSD (price/performance)
into a more then congested market. The future will tell.

Well done Thorsten (and team).

Cheers

UPDATE 05/13/2014:

I finally returned the Nano iDSD. There are several reasons.
Power and battery handling, combined off-on-volume control knob and 5V sensing.
Manual analog volume adjustment. Rather lean low-end.
The Light Harmonic measurements left a kind of strange feeling, even though Thorsten was showing different measurements.
There still seems to be a slight impact by iPurifer and iUSB power. I'd expect that not to happen on a battery powered DAC. I havn't tested it by myself though.

And last but not least. The market segment of thumbdacs is still evolving rather quickly.

Bottom line. I still think price,features and soundquality puts the iDSD Nano in the top range of todays thumpdacs. I do think there's space for improvement. That's why it goes back.

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 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 21:59:07 05/12/14 (3)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - soundchekk 00:05:40 05/13/14 (2)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 00:43:27 05/13/14 (1)

...

Show full thread outline!

 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 21:59:07 05/12/14 (3)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - soundchekk 00:05:40 05/13/14 (2)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 00:43:27 05/13/14 (1)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - soundchekk 01:31:02 05/13/14 (0)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 11:40:10 05/08/14 (4)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - soundchekk 03:54:13 05/09/14 (3)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 23:00:11 05/09/14 (2)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - soundchekk 05:50:42 05/10/14 (1)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Thorsten 06:33:36 05/10/14 (0)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Bob_C 06:58:15 05/03/14 (0)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - Mercman 02:53:42 05/03/14 (0)
 RE: ifi Nano iDSD - first impressions - theob 07:18:30 05/02/14 (0)

1.
Instead of new funny features (e.g. 3D Sound and XBASS) I'd rather
like to see better Power-ON/OFF features as mentioned before.
If I turn off the PC the DAC should automatically power off as well,
to avoid draining the battery. And please. No combined VC control and on/off switch.

Low-end and power

Perhaps you need a little more/faster buffering or a better battery (lower ESR) to push the low-end into the regions of the Dragonfly performance.

But perhaps it's the opamp in the output stage that prevents it!?!?

2.

The other day I read an article where Light Harmonic(Fish)
was comparing (showing several measurements and graphs) your
iDSD device against the Geek Out and the Dragonfly.

http://geek.lhlabs.com/force/geekout/898-geek-out-vs-the-others,-3rd-installment.html

Gordons and your device didn't look that great in comparison.
I guess you've seen it.

Probably there's some space for improvement.

If those differences are audible is another question.

3.
On a new DAC device the iPurifier and the iUSB power device should not have any impact anymore.
A slight increase on the pricetag would be acceptable,if this can be accomplished.

4.
You might want to recap your marketing strategy. It's nice to see
rather quick product evolution. However. Short product cycles
might pi.... some customers off.

On the other hand. I like that "crowd" design project you run over at Head-Fi.
You might launch another project that focuses on the next stage of the iDAC. I'd guess the majority over here focuses on stereo audio. You might consider a very special DAC device (maybe even NOS alla Metrum or the new DDDAC). Or you might introduce XLR & RCA outputs ....

BTW. Are you folks using the newest XMOS which uses an 48Mhz clock for the async reclocking?? http://www.diyinhk.com/shop/audio-kits/58-xmos-dsd-dxd-384khz-high-quality-usb-to-i2s-pcb.html

######

Anyhow. There seems to be quite some new stuff popping up soon.

That's why I'll sent the Nano iDSD back now.
I'll survive one or two month without it.

BTW. Will you be on the High-End in Munich next week?

Cheers

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Maybe I need to give you some business background...

For iFi we are aiming for this year to have three different tiers in our mainline products (we also have acessories).

nano range - small, focus portability, < appx. 250 USD

micro range - medium size luggable/portable, < appx. 500 USD

mini range - desktop sized mini format, near state of the art, pro audio crossover < appx. 1,000 USD

They all share technologies but are aimed at different market segments.

The iDSD micro will be part of the micro range and will be "crossover product", still acceptably portable (smaller than my Samsung "MEGA" Phablet) with a big battery etc., but the performance of a serious desktop product.

Of course, the iDSD mini will take things up another few notches in a pure desktop/rack unit.

Something that might interest the crowd here is actually the iFi Retro system:

This is an "all in one" Mini System, with an EL84 Push-Pull Tube Amp, fully DSD128, DXD and PCM capable DAC, Bluetooth and a Phono stage. Includes Speakers (LS-3/5 inspired Mini's but with 90dB/2.83V/1m sensitivity.

But again,I doubt many people here fancy an affordable "all in one" when they can spend more money on a single pair of interconnects and when they can get separate DAC's, Preamp's, Amp's etc...

I suspect few if any of the iFi products cater all that well to the traditional High End HiFI crowd, they are too small and too cheap to be taken serious and the fact that we have decided to acknowledge that a whole generation of listeners uses headphones pretty much exclusively and thus cater for them will not sit well either.

Too bad. But not for us.

As it is, we cannot keep most iFi products in stock and have been rapidly expanding production capacity in the last year and a halve, but sales still outpace production. With the new products coming I see no reversal of that trend either...

Thor

At 20 bits, you are on the verge of dynamic range covering fly-farts-at-20-feet to intolerable pain. Really, what more could we need?

Thx for letting us know.

Though DSD is not at all important to me. It's a nice to have feature.
And it looks great on a marketing paper.

I'm really wondering if anybody with a mobile device (main target group !??!) intends to play DSD-256 or even DSD at all. The majority won't go above mp3.

BTW. I returned my Nano iDSD last Friday.

Main reason is the power/battery handling for stationary use.
Here the M2Tech DAC or the Dragonfly or the Meridian are much easier
to handle.
The software controlled analog VC of the Dragonfly is
also much more convenient then the Nano iDSD HW analog control for stationary usage. No need to readjust/calibrate everytime I power-up the system with the DF. (I've got my entire system hidden in a closed sideboard. Control of all equipment Cubie/DAC/AMP is 100% (even power-onoff) done via WLAN & tablet/phone).

Cheers

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