Jimster480
Major Contributor
Makes no sense. The performance is horrible and was horrible back in 2019. There were devices for the same price which still had better performance all the way back in 2019.Fair assessment mate - the iFi Zen Dac is a great starting point and still use the V1 as my desktop setup from PC. Obviously it's not ideal using the headphone output and sound effect/modes but alright for people until they buy a dedicated amp. Lacks depth and power. I've got it set as a pre-amp, connected to a Drop THX AAA 789 via 4.4mm pentaconn to XLR balanced cable, and it sounds excellent to me. Works well in Exclusive mode with Tidal and MQA (don't start about that but they do hi-res FLAC too, just nice when the led changes colours to confirm).
No doubt everything has increased in price but was hard to go past the Zen Dac when it was A$200 (~US$130) years ago. I looked up that Audient id14 mk2 device, looks like it's more for microphones but guess it's a DAC as well.
It can't even achieve 16 bit performance on audio.