This is a review and detailed measurements of the ifi Zen balanced DAC and headphone amplifier. I purchased it from Amazon last week. The Zen DAC costs US $130 including free shipping.
I must say, I am not a fan of the look of the Zen DAC. It hearkens back to 1960s furniture style which would look out of place on most desktops:
Despite commonality of aluminum in audio products today, the Zen must be using some kind of steel for its shell as it is quite heavy for its size. And sturdy to boot.
The controls are confusing. "Power Match" seems to just be extra gain/power and nothing to do with ifi's "IEMatch" products which lower output volume. Despite having plenty of space on the front, the "balanced" headphone output is 4.4mm jack which is much more rare. These guys have made such a mess out of this business of "balanced" headphones with so many connectors. I had to pay $25 to buy an XLR to 4.4mm adapter as I could hardly find the 4.4 mm plug itself to make my own cable!
I forgot to measure the Truebass effect. I did listen to it and it seems good if not somewhat overboosted. I wonder if it sounds as an improvement over longer listening period than when you first turn it on.
The rear follows ifi's proclivity for not following standardized connectors:
The USB connector is 3.0 but I wonder if it actually negotiates and uses the much higher power capability of such an interface. They supply a cable but it is just 6 inches or so. Even if you have USB connection to your monitor this is going to be awfully short.
No DC 5 volt adapter was supplied even though it seems the packaging had space for it. And something about it is taped over in the documentation.
I like the fixed versus variable analog output. But again was not a fan of the 4.4 mm for line out. Who uses that? I did not have a cable to test that so no measurements on that.
Overall, the packaging is fine especially at the price but someone went out of their way to make things different and possibly not for the better.
DAC Audio Measurements
I set the rear connector to fixed output and ran our usual dashboard view:
ifi is a fan of using these Burr-Brown/TI DAC chips which severely limit distortion ratings to neighborhood you see. They are long overdue to switch to an ESS or AKM IC to get much better performance. As it is, performance is just not competitive:
We have distortions that pierce the noise floor of 16-bit audio even.
Noise performance is better though than distortion:
Filter response is the typical, default, a bit slow response we see in DAC chip implementations:
Our 32-tone test signal resembling "music" shows a bit better performance than the dashboard indicates, now clearing 16 bit performance:
Linearity is "good enough" but not as nice and flat as I like to see:
Intermodulation distortion versus input signal level shows clear deficiency:
We start with higher noise level but then distortion takes over at around -17 dB and keeps getting worse.
Jitter response looks better than it is due to higher noise level:
Finally, sweep of distortion+noise versus frequency tells us that performance is universally sub-optimal:
So really, the DAC foundation here is quite weak.
Headphone Amplifier Audio Measurements
Let's start with seeing how much good power we have into 300 ohm load resembling performance of driving headphones in that class (e.g. Sennheiser HD-650):
That's not good. A desktop product should be able to produce a lot more clean power. I like to see 100 milliwatts here as to future proof the device for any high-impedance headphone you may own or buy later.
The situation does not improve much with the other extreme load of 33 ohm:
Notice that in both cases the "Power Match" button simply removes a limit allowing the unit to get louder but at the expense of distortion.
Testing for "Balanced" headphone output, my load is 50 ohm so let's compare that to single-ended:
So you do get some advantage if you use the 4.4 mm connector, nearly tripling the output. Same rise in distortion exist though more or less so this is not clean power necessarily.
Noise performance is good at max power, but not so at low power levels which may be used with sensitive IEMs.
So you may experience some hiss there.
Another departure here from the norm of DAC+Amps is to use an analog volume control instead of using the digital one in the DAC chip. As a result, we lose the perfect channel match we normally see in such devices:
Headphone Listening Tests
I could not get useful volume without Power Match activated. Once there, I had decent volume with Sennheiser HD-650 headphones. Compared to my reference Topping DX3 Pro however, it just could not get as loud without getting distorted. And never had the clean output that the DX3 Pro had.
With Drop Ether CX low impedance headphones, there was no usable performance to be had using 1/4 headphone jack. Switching to "balanced" 4.4 mm jack, did provide some relief and I could listen reasonably loud. But turn up the volume past about 1:00 o'clock and distortion would set in in the form of harshness and brightness, eventually leading to clearly static and drop outs.
Conclusions
The ifi Zen on paper has dazzlingly good feature set for its price. Lots of connectivity is there together with a western company standing behind it. Alas, the DAC portion is yesterday's news and not competitive. Headphone output is low and distorts quite easily.
Redeeming the unit is availability of more power through its 4.4 mm "balanced" headphone jack and very low price for the category.
Net, net, it works and is adequately good. Won't hold a candle to higher end devices or separates. For $200 you can get a DAC and Amp combo that would run circles around it.
I can't recommend the ifi Zen DAC as long as I have my audio performance elitist hat on.
You can choose to do otherwise without said hair covering.
--------
As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.
Picked up a load of maple hardwood from a tree the neighbor had cut down. Could not get any of the panthers to come and help so I had to pay someone else to do it. Plan to use the wood in our wood fired Pizza over. Knowing that you want me to eat well, I hope you help me rebalance my checkbook by donating using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
I must say, I am not a fan of the look of the Zen DAC. It hearkens back to 1960s furniture style which would look out of place on most desktops:
Despite commonality of aluminum in audio products today, the Zen must be using some kind of steel for its shell as it is quite heavy for its size. And sturdy to boot.
The controls are confusing. "Power Match" seems to just be extra gain/power and nothing to do with ifi's "IEMatch" products which lower output volume. Despite having plenty of space on the front, the "balanced" headphone output is 4.4mm jack which is much more rare. These guys have made such a mess out of this business of "balanced" headphones with so many connectors. I had to pay $25 to buy an XLR to 4.4mm adapter as I could hardly find the 4.4 mm plug itself to make my own cable!
I forgot to measure the Truebass effect. I did listen to it and it seems good if not somewhat overboosted. I wonder if it sounds as an improvement over longer listening period than when you first turn it on.
The rear follows ifi's proclivity for not following standardized connectors:
The USB connector is 3.0 but I wonder if it actually negotiates and uses the much higher power capability of such an interface. They supply a cable but it is just 6 inches or so. Even if you have USB connection to your monitor this is going to be awfully short.
No DC 5 volt adapter was supplied even though it seems the packaging had space for it. And something about it is taped over in the documentation.
I like the fixed versus variable analog output. But again was not a fan of the 4.4 mm for line out. Who uses that? I did not have a cable to test that so no measurements on that.
Overall, the packaging is fine especially at the price but someone went out of their way to make things different and possibly not for the better.
DAC Audio Measurements
I set the rear connector to fixed output and ran our usual dashboard view:
ifi is a fan of using these Burr-Brown/TI DAC chips which severely limit distortion ratings to neighborhood you see. They are long overdue to switch to an ESS or AKM IC to get much better performance. As it is, performance is just not competitive:
We have distortions that pierce the noise floor of 16-bit audio even.
Noise performance is better though than distortion:
Filter response is the typical, default, a bit slow response we see in DAC chip implementations:
Our 32-tone test signal resembling "music" shows a bit better performance than the dashboard indicates, now clearing 16 bit performance:
Linearity is "good enough" but not as nice and flat as I like to see:
Intermodulation distortion versus input signal level shows clear deficiency:
We start with higher noise level but then distortion takes over at around -17 dB and keeps getting worse.
Jitter response looks better than it is due to higher noise level:
Finally, sweep of distortion+noise versus frequency tells us that performance is universally sub-optimal:
So really, the DAC foundation here is quite weak.
Headphone Amplifier Audio Measurements
Let's start with seeing how much good power we have into 300 ohm load resembling performance of driving headphones in that class (e.g. Sennheiser HD-650):
That's not good. A desktop product should be able to produce a lot more clean power. I like to see 100 milliwatts here as to future proof the device for any high-impedance headphone you may own or buy later.
The situation does not improve much with the other extreme load of 33 ohm:
Notice that in both cases the "Power Match" button simply removes a limit allowing the unit to get louder but at the expense of distortion.
Testing for "Balanced" headphone output, my load is 50 ohm so let's compare that to single-ended:
So you do get some advantage if you use the 4.4 mm connector, nearly tripling the output. Same rise in distortion exist though more or less so this is not clean power necessarily.
Noise performance is good at max power, but not so at low power levels which may be used with sensitive IEMs.
So you may experience some hiss there.
Another departure here from the norm of DAC+Amps is to use an analog volume control instead of using the digital one in the DAC chip. As a result, we lose the perfect channel match we normally see in such devices:
Headphone Listening Tests
I could not get useful volume without Power Match activated. Once there, I had decent volume with Sennheiser HD-650 headphones. Compared to my reference Topping DX3 Pro however, it just could not get as loud without getting distorted. And never had the clean output that the DX3 Pro had.
With Drop Ether CX low impedance headphones, there was no usable performance to be had using 1/4 headphone jack. Switching to "balanced" 4.4 mm jack, did provide some relief and I could listen reasonably loud. But turn up the volume past about 1:00 o'clock and distortion would set in in the form of harshness and brightness, eventually leading to clearly static and drop outs.
Conclusions
The ifi Zen on paper has dazzlingly good feature set for its price. Lots of connectivity is there together with a western company standing behind it. Alas, the DAC portion is yesterday's news and not competitive. Headphone output is low and distorts quite easily.
Redeeming the unit is availability of more power through its 4.4 mm "balanced" headphone jack and very low price for the category.
Net, net, it works and is adequately good. Won't hold a candle to higher end devices or separates. For $200 you can get a DAC and Amp combo that would run circles around it.
I can't recommend the ifi Zen DAC as long as I have my audio performance elitist hat on.
You can choose to do otherwise without said hair covering.--------
As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.
Picked up a load of maple hardwood from a tree the neighbor had cut down. Could not get any of the panthers to come and help so I had to pay someone else to do it. Plan to use the wood in our wood fired Pizza over. Knowing that you want me to eat well, I hope you help me rebalance my checkbook by donating using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
