Hi, I'm Steve, and I want to talk to you today about the iFi Audio Pro iDSD.
It's kind of a high-performance multi-tool for audio, so it's a
combination DAC, digital-to-analog converter, stereo preamp, headphone amp,
and music streamer. So I primarily used it as a DAC and a preamp in my system,
and in my system I normally use an Oppo BDP-105 as both my disc player and kind
of as my preamp because I have it connected directly to my stereo power
amp. However, to try out this DAC I used a coaxial digital connection out from the
Oppo into the iFi and then from there I went from the iFi straight into my
power amp, so I was using its DAC capabilities and its stereo preamp
circuitry. I think probably most people that will be interested in this will be
interested in it for its DAC capabilities, and it's pretty impressive
as a DAC. This is absolutely the best DAC that I've ever had in my system. I was
mainly listening to CDs, although I did also at one point connect my macbook and
listened to some high-res files from my computer, but just in general the sound
quality was very three-dimensional for me. Probably the most important aspect
of sound quality is the soundstaging, how you know, the instruments and voices are
presented on stage. You know, how 3D the effect is and also how much of the room
where the recording happened is picked up, and this DAC was an exceptional at
doing all those things. I listened to, you know, a lot of my favorite recordings and
I knew that I was supposed to be trying to listen critically, but time and again
I just kept getting so pulled in the music that I had not only listened to
the track that I was intending to but I just listened to several more tracks
because it was just sounding so good. And and I think the reason for that is
it's got very high quality...it actually uses four high-resolution Burr-Brown DACs
used in an interleaved array to handle just a stereo signal, so there's a lot of
processing power there for the signal, and then also iFi pays a lot of
attention to rejecting noise and interference in their gear. And
one way they do that, for instance, is this AC power adapter, which as you can
see it's it's a lot bigger than the typical small wall wart that you see a
lot of times on gear, and there's just a lot more going on in this thing as far
as conditioning the power and and making sure there's as little interference as
possible coming in through the AC power. As far as the the controls on the front,
because this unit does so much, most of the controls have multi functions. So for
instance, there is a little LED indicator up here in the corner and that tells you
what the operation mode is of the DAC, whether it's about warming up, whether
it's in solid state mode, tube mode, or in protection mode, and yeah, you heard me,
right there's both solid-state and tube operating modes for this guy. And that
really intrigued me because this unit has both a tube and a solid-state input
stage and output stage, and there's a three-position switch on the front panel
where you can select either solid-state, tube, or something that iFi calls
"tube plus", and that is a mode where it reduces the the negative feedback in the
circuit and then also sort of enhances the sound through adding a little bit of
second-order harmonic distortion, which that's one of the things that a lot of
people attribute that the sound of tubes do, and tubes generally are supposed
to sound warm. And a lot of times, the analog is the adjective that's used for
tube sound. So when I was switching back and forth, I
expected there to be a pretty noticeable difference between the solid state and
the tube modes, and I didn't really actually hear that. It kind of surprised
me. Both modes were very clean and open and dynamic, but I didn't hear sort of
the stereotypical tube sound that a lot of people talked about when I was in
tube mode, so actually for the most part I generally left it in solid state mode.
There's a lot of sound processing and digital filtering, and and you can
actually choose from that and to kind of customize the sound a little more, and
that's kind of unusual for a for a DAC. I mean, typically you know, there's
the sound that the designer intended for the component, and that's
your one option, but iFi gives you several different options. So for
instance, you can choose to have like basically a non-oversampling mode and
that's both for PCM signals and for DSD, or you can have it do PCM upsampling, or
you can have it do DSD remastering. I did try several of the filtering options for
PCM and again, not sure if it was because my system just wasn't revealing enough
or because my hearing is starting to fade, but I had a hard time hearing, you
know, really meaningful differences between the filter options, so I ended up
going with sort of the the two kind of vanilla-flavored options, which would be
a bit called bit-perfect and bit-perfect plus. And again, in both cases the sound
was just incredibly clean, there was if I had to use one word to
describe the sound it would be "transparency", because again you could
could hear so far into the sound stage, very low-level details pretty much on
every record I listened to, I was hearing details that I hadn't heard before. And I
talked about how flexible this unit is, and
that goes for sort of, you know, the kind of system that you have...you know, I think
I mainly used it as part of a two-channel stereo system. It was
connected to my amplifier driving a pair of speakers, but as you can see because
of its small size you could easily use it in a desktop system to power, you know,
connect it to a pair of powered speakers would be terrific, and also it has a
great headphone amplifier built in. There are three different connections on the
front panel for hooking up your your headphones, there's a standard quarter
inch connector, there's a mini-jack connector, and there's a balanced
connector as well. I just used the quarter inch connector with a couple of
different headphones. I'm not a big headphone guy, but I could
definitely tell that the headphone amp in this unit was quite a bit better than
the dedicated headphone amp in my Oppo player, which is actually known to be a
pretty strong headphone amp. So as far as the inputs and outputs, this has both RCA
and balanced XLR outputs for connecting to your amplifier. On the input side it
has a single combination connector for coaxial and mini optical input, there's
both type-A and type-B USB, there is AES EBU XLR, which is a balanced form of
digital input. And then as far as network connections, there's an Ethernet
connection and then there's also a built in Wi-Fi with a Wi-Fi antenna. I didn't
actually use any of the network connections, but this unit does come set
up to play Spotify, TIDAL, including mqa, and Qobuz. There's one thing, is that it
does come with a remote control. It is to control volume only, so it's a very basic
remote control. And if there's one thing that I might have wished for with this
unit is I wish that it kind of had a more full-function remote control for
the preamp features, for instance like select selecting inputs and things
like that. And also the display, it tells you useful things like mostly about what
the incoming signal is, but it doesn't have something like volume level which I
think would be useful because I usually try to keep it within a certain volume
range when I'm listening to different recordings. All right, so that's pretty
much it for the iFi Audio Pro iDSD DAC, preamp, headphone amp, streamer. If you
have any questions, leave a comment below. If you like this video, hit the "like"
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