iFi Audio

Any iFi owners around? I have an iCAN Micro with me now for review.

The 3D/crossfeed is very impactful. I was expecting a setting with a super subtle crossfeed, but neither setting is particularly subtle.

The bass boost is quite good (but I'm an admitted basshead).

Tons of gain control options.

And it's quite reasonably priced.

 

Hey. A couple of days ago i tried the iFi Micro with the HD800s. Compared it to more expensive stuff like Musical Fideliy MX line up, the T+A DAC8 (integradet headphone amp) and also to the Fiio E17.
Here my impressions:
At the end it wasn’t for me. All the “Gimmicks” like XBass, 3D-Sound and even the filters hat mostly negative effects on the sound signature. But that's surely i a totally subjerctive thing. When in normal mode I had to put the volume at least to 50% for low listening levels. Turbo mode was out of the question, because it caused the sound to be overdriven. And - even if it’s purely superficial - for a device that costs nearly 600EUR it didn’t feel that great. At least not to me. There’s nothing wrong the overall build quality, I just felt a bit “cheap”. On the plus side, you get an insane amount of accessories (all kinds of cables, pouch, straps,…).
Keep in mind that I feed my HD800s with die Ifi, so this might be a somewhat unsuitable combination. They might work great with other phones.

 

Which Micro? iDSD?

The iCAN is much less expensive and has more gain options and settings, just no dac.

From what I've read, it's the better amp.

I wonder if you'd be better off going Emotiva Big Ego > iFi iCAN Micro versus iDSD (although the iDSD has a battery and the others don't).

 

Yeah, that's what i meant: iDSD Micro. Sorry for the confusion.
Just posted my impressions, because i thought the sound of the iDSD Micros headamp section might be comparable to the iCAN.

 

I imagine they are pretty close. A review I watched from someone with both said he prefers the iCAN amp section to the iDSD.



I just plugged in my HD650s to the iCAN. The Audio-GD Roc does it more justice, to be honest, but the bass switch on the lowest level flattens the sub-bass response of the 650 nicely.

Right now I'm trying to figure out what to use at work as an amp to pair with the Bifrost Multibit.

The primary contenders are the iCAN, Project Ember II, and Lyr 2. I'll be going single-ended at work and will mostly use it with my JVC HP-DX1000s.

 

I have an iCAN.

It was a newbie purchase. It just happened that, on one internet-down day, I walked across the room and plugged my phones into the headphone socket of a Cyrus integrated amp and thought "wow! Must get a headphone amp for the desk!"

I got fascinated by the cross-feed thing, and that was the main reason for the buy. I'd heard it in the shop when I bought the phones.

It turned out that the XBass actually made a desirable difference with those AT AD900s, and I used to keep the 3D on "..." for the perceived treble boost as much as that cross-feed. Now I have HD600, those switches stay mostly at off.

The only other HP amps I have had on my desk are a bottlehead Crack and one of those small Ocean things that stops working as soon as it heats up, which is fairly quickly. Both are, by comparison, warm, tooby-sounding boxes, which is fine, and I can see why people enjoy, but it isn't the sound for me. I have not had the chance to compare the iCAN with any other solid-state or cooler-tube amp. I recall, once, somebody on HF [I think] saying that it was on a par with the O2.