They really seem to defy every market segment they are embedded into. The Zen DAC, as I see it, is the more sensible product of the whole line up, the more extreme you go the more out of touch it feels, aside from the ifi iCan which is boutique.
Too many cooks and a sales & marketing department that basically cannot sell a product and asks for new products usually based on looking at someone else and going "they are selling this well we need one like that, so we can make sales".
As a result there are always too many products developed. In way too many areas, manufacturing is fragmented and inefficient, economics of scales are not realised and
Schiit's and Shenzen tech audio's approach is to deliver greatest power and objective perfomance for the budget line, and then more features the further up you go (in case of Shenzen), or more subjective minded implementations like discrete, class A, tube amps and r2r or multibit dacs at higher level in case of western audio (Schiit in mind).
It was supposed to look different with a sensible lineup. Not necessarily following Schiit or SZ people, but with a structured lineup.
As you can see with ifi's "top line" Pro DAC / CAN Tubes are a possibility. At one time a portable "Pro" all in one was on the drawing board, for example.
Meanwhile, ifi still use their burr brown delta sigma extensively (to its own niche merit), and lay in a weird middle ground for the mid lineup, having neither high power nor "audiophile" topologies.
The DSD1793 is a good chip to use because of a range of features. Switching to one of the "Better" Chip's does not sound better or offer other benefits. If better SNR is required, we can run multiple IC's parallel or even interleaved (similar to Accuphase).
Using 4pcs DSD1793 will give 119dB SNR. Yes a single PCM1792 on paper does better for similar money, but not much. Once you account for the extra current and needed analogue stages etc. the 4 X DSD1793 is a sensible choice. Control software is developed as well. So
Honestly, I tried discrete R2R and discrete DSD only DAC's (we designed a suitable FPGA D2D converter engine to feed this) and did not feel that this was better than using multiple DSD1793 instead.
I'd love to do something with the 1MSPS 20-Bit Multibit ADC & DAC's from Linear, but it's too expensive.
Generally ifi now is simply overpriced. With the iDSD micro and derived designs (including diablo) you have way more power, but the desktop equivalents never got made and instead of upgrading the "micro" platform with all of the features from the X lineup they just warmed over old 2013 designs and sold them expensive. I suspect they have no-body to do actually independent design.
I had already picked a different chip that may have gone into more designs than just ultra-portables and which provided similar feature sets (Filters) and sound quality in a more modern device with higher objective performance.
But the latests ifi originated designs just seem to copy the same generic designs everyone in Shenzhen does. I expect soon ifi will try to sell you the same as topping et all, but not as well manufactured at a much higher price and it will sound like all the generic chinese stuff.
Thor
