Hi Everyone,
I purchased an ifi ZEN DAC (v1) in March and was very happy and extremely satisfied with both good looking exterior and clear, transparent and dynamic sound of this DAC during the very first weeks when I used the unbalanced headphones output on front and RCA outputs on the backside only.
But I have also purchased appropriate adapter cables for utilizing the balanced outputs to achieve even better sound quality and then I have discovered a serious problem.
Almost each output is okay (incl. balanced out on the backside) but the balanced headphones output on the front panel produces extremely high distortion on both right and left channels, independently from the bit-rate of the source, output volume level and button settings. The music can be heard using this output is terribly distorted and washed away, which is especially obvious in case of solo piano records. The cable and headphones have to be okay since, using the same cable and headphones, the unbalanced output on the back is fine as well as the other outputs.
I have Sennheiser HD598 headphones (50 Ohm impedance) which I love and have not realized any issue with this headphones so far therefore I asked ifi-Audio to replace (and upgrade for extra charge of course) this DAC but the new v2 has the same problem!!!
According to the official iFi-Audio site:
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Headphone Section
Output Power (@1% THD)4.4mm Pentaconn (BAL)
330mW@32 Ohm; 6.6V@600 Ohm;
16 Ohm - 600 Ohm Headphone
6.3mm S-BAL (SE)
230mW@32 Ohm; 3.3V@600 Ohm
16 Ohm - 600 Ohm Headphone
**************
So my 50 Ohm Sennheiser HD598 has to fit both unbalanced and balanced headphones outputs (16 Ohm < 50 Ohm < 600 Ohm) but the support office of iFi-Audio did not help me. (They wrote: my headphones is not compatible with ZEN DAC...)
However, it is extremely strange to me that no one else could hear this failure (I could find just one same error report on the internet so far).
Is there someone to explain me what the problem is?
Thanks in advance!