IMO in light of this critical information I think the headphone amp section deserves to be retested. It will be a shame not to. preamp performed well I think the headphone section at different gain settings will too.
But I’m also pretty sure there are studios/people using this who don’t know about the gain settings underneath, it’s just seems unlikely that people will always be flipping such a big expensive well painted amp around each time when plugging different heaphones in.
Gain settings at the bottom is really useless. I basically had to uncable it every time, find a small tool to change the settings and then set the whole thing back up.
Given the distortion that comes with the elevated gain it's not really usable this way so it's better just left in standard gain mode.
I don't blame the headphone amp for the distortion though because i think it's just the nature of things that elevating the gain above 0dB creates distortion. Thats why usual headphone amps high gain caps at 0dB and low/medium gain is negative dB. However some people don't seem to notice that. I had another amp that also offered, additionaly to the normal low /medium/high gain, a +10 dB boost gain resulting in massive audible distortion and one guy told me the headphone now had "more headroom".
The amp itself sounds beautifully with normal headphones. That means zero noisefloor with IEMs and sensitive cans like Denon AH-D9200 and more than enough power for a HD600. For lower sensitive 600 Ohm cans and hard to drive planars like Susvara or HE-6 i think its suboptimal.
Volume can be controlled remotely. You can basically use every infrared remote lying around.
Crossfeed is very practical for me but i lack comparison to other crossfeed solutions here. Overall i used this one way more often than the Adis crossfeed. From what i've heard from guys who know their shit the Phonitors crossfeed is best in class and also the main selling point.
Three inputs (2 XLR and 1 RCA) are very practical. RCA is in standard mode reduced by -10dB but can be elevated to 0dB via a dip switch on the bottom which can be done without a problem since switching from negative to zero gain doesn't harm the soundquality (contrary to switching from zero to additional gain).
The amp is unbalanced thus using the SE connectors should theoretically have a slight edge compared to using the XLR connectors here which should induce some kind of distortion. However XLR are also perfectly fine.
Personally i've never listened to the dac and probably wouldn't use. I think there are better solutions.
If you want to save money just take the Phonitor 2 instead of the X. It's the same amp and preamp with a few more features and way less expensive. Only thing that it doens't have is the XLR out which is inferior to the 1/4 output anyway.
Personally i couldn't care less about the VU Meters and the build quality but coming from a way more expensive amp i think the Phonitor is actually a very good package. I'd also love to see it retested at 0dB gain.
I have a Topping D90 + A90 stack on the way and i'm looking forward to compare it to my current setup.