This is a review and detailed measurements of the ifi Zen CAN balanced headphone amplifier. It is on kind loan from a member and costs US $150 from Amazon including Prime shipping.
The design is identical to new line of budget products from ifi:
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No, it is not just the pictures. The silver labels on brushed metal are almost invisible. I literally had to tilt the unit, changing lighting, etc. to see what they say. I suppose you get used to it after a bit but still, should have used black ink.
The back panel is unusual in that it provides another 4.4 mm socket for balanced input:
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I didn't have an adapter for that kind of use so I limited my testing to RCA in. Power is provided by a Chinese generic 2.5 amp power supply and not the usual ifi one. Cost pressure and or requirements for voltage and current must have pushed them in this direction.
From what I recall, this is a discrete implementation so will be nice to see how it performs relative most of the market which uses IC opamps.
ifi Zen CAN Measurements
I used the lowest gain setting of 0 dB as that allowed unity gain for both unbalanced and balanced output for the dashboard. Let's start with unbalanced:
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Distortion is at -100 dB which dominates SINAD. Interestingly it did not change when switching to balanced:
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What is there is respectable but pretty far short of state of the art we see from other companies:
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Signal to noise ratio is very good at unity gain:
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50 mv output performance is above average but again, lags state of the art products:
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So very sensitive IEMs may generate audible noise if you play above 84 dB.
Frequency response is flat and good:
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As we have seen before xBass provides significant amount of boost and extends to nearly 500 Hz. Would be nice to see such a boost but limited to 50 to 60 Hz where it is most needed for many headphones. Make it adjustable and you have a winning feature. As it is, it either works or is too much.
Someone mentioned measuring crosstalk and they were right:
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This is quite low for an amplifier. There is strong capacitive coupling between the channels. Would like to see this improved by 30+ dB, not for audible sake necessarily but for engineering excellence.
Channel matching was not great with disturbances early and going past my 0.5 dB threshold before a lot of attenuation:
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Fortunately you have the 0dB setting for gain which should help you keep the volume from being too low.
The main theme of company's promotion is availability of power so let's start with 300 ohm unbalanced and then balanced:
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Wow, in balanced mode this thing pumps out serious amount of power! My requirement here is 100 milliwatts and the Zen Can sails way past it in balanced mode to 645 milliwatts. And while distortion is not yet again state of the art, it is good enough to be competitive and not an audible concern.
Switching to the other extreme with 32 ohm unfortunately changed the picture fair bit:
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I suspect the design is current starved as we can see it get worse as impedance goes even lower:
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Ifi Zen CAN Headphone Listening Tests
It is a gorgeous day here with blue skies, temperatures in 70s F and little humidity. This apparently enticed my XLR to unbalanced headphone adapter to take a walk so my testing is limited to using balanced output of the Zen CAN only. There, I started with Sennheiser HD650. I am telling, this thing can pump some serious power into these headphones. Play some techno music with heavy bass, turn up the volume and your skull may literally shrink a millimeter or two after being pounded in the middle by this headphone and amp combination!!! The sound is powerful, detailed and with no hint of distortion I could detect.
I was very surprised how much performance dropped when testing with my Ether CX 25 ohm headphone, again in balanced mode. Turn up the volume past moderately loud and the sound starts to get distorted. Turn it up a bit more and bass notes cause momentary muting, and distortion is abundantly audible. Now "normal" listening may be before all of this happens but still, I would not recommend low impedance headphones with this amplifier.
Conclusions
Despite paving its own path here, ifi gets a number of things right. Price is very attractive for balanced headphone amplifier. Feature set is very good. Most importantly this thing produces a ton of clean power into high impedance loads. Down sides are poor crosstalk, and inability to drive low impedance headphones well or at all.
I am going to give a conditional recommendation for ifi Zen CAN for high impedance headphone use only. It is one of the best in that category if not unique with the incredible amount of power it has together with balanced I/O and multiple gain settings. Outside of that the weaknesses of the design stand out too much to recommend over many other alternatives.
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