Hi,
I bought one of these, so I wanted to update the thread in case anyone else is thinking of buying one.
The device contains an SA9023 DAC, which I believe is respectable.
The sound quality is pretty decent (to my non-audiophile ear). I did a very casual AB test, comparing it to the built-in DAC of my Nokia 8 (whose sound seems comparable to the $15 Samsung dongle DAC) and found that the fever DAC gave sound which has slightly more crisp highs and slightly punchier bass.
Using ATM50X headphones, I find 50% volume is comfortable for listening to music, so it has a fair amount of oomph, but I've not tried anything more demanding.
There was no audible noise floor for me and when I plugged it into my microserver (which has a noisy USB bus) I could hear no noise. By comparison, the Dragonfly Black has a pretty high noise floor, and sounded like crap when used on that machine.
The video linked above, and a few other reviews I found online, all note that the device has compatibility issues. I tried it on several different devices and got varying results:
- Linux machine: works.
- Nokia 8: didn't work at first (see below).
- Kindle fire 10HD: works.
- Several OpenBSD machine: didn't work (but see below).
About the Nokia 8. I managed to get it working by using a powered USB hub, so obviously this device draws a fair amount of current. Something to bear in mind.
About the OpenBSD machines. I spent some time looking into this, as this is my daily driver. The device exposes three USB interfaces (uhid, mixer and audio stream), but they are assigned interface numbers 0, 1 and 3. Because the interface numbers are non-contiguous, this means that the device is not properly USB compliant and this confuses OpenBSD's USB stack (and probably some other operating systems too)? More technical details
here. I suspect the Android and Linux USB stacks are somewhat resilient to uncompliant devices then...
So to conclude, it's a nice (and cheap) little device but compatibility may be a gamble due to power consumption and hardware bugs.
