Gadgetory

I am Michael Goodman from sentence right here at the Rocky Mountain audio fest we're premiering our new product the high five mate it is spelled H I fil a and you call it hifi mate it's right here you can pan over we have in a glass case here hifi mate is a portable DAC and a headphone amp with two inputs one is a USB input and the other one is an iphone input so what this product does is it allows you to plug in either a laptop or an iPhone you can also plug an android phone which is compatible with USB audio the real attractions of hi-fi mate here are balanced output connectors with high level drive capability to drive pretty much any headphones on the market if you notice in this model we're showing the combo XLR connector which can accept either the quarter inch jack in the middle or the big XLR jack so a lot of balanced headphones actually come with two XLR Jack's one for the left one for the right so you can plug those in or you can plug in to regular quarter-inch headphones into this thing and it'll drive them just fine this is a volume control so that's the output side of hyphenate this is the input side of the hi-fi mate and I think that's the more interested interesting site in addition to the USB input and the iphone input and a power jack which accepts anything from 7 volts to 23 volts allowing this to be powered from pretty much any power supply in the market or an external battery which you can strap on to extend the battery life time we have a number of sonic shaping switches which basically control EQ and level to allow to mate the hi-fi mate to a variety of different headphones from iems to over the head models it will accommodate headphones with different impedances different sensitivities and also different frequency curves so let's run down the switches real quick the one on the left is the impedance which it offers you three positions of different impedances which allows you to match the output impedance of hifi mate to the input impedance of the headphones and produce better linearity in the frequency response a more flat response to your taste the second switch is a volume switch or gain switch there's three positions on that switch as well as little speaker icon on that and that allows you to match the level of hifi mate to a variety of headphones from IEMs all the way to over the head headphones such that you're always listening at a comfortable position of the volume knob and this product so for example if you have sensitive headphones you might previously find yourself having to run it right here and that's not a really comfortable spot so by lowering the gain by switching the the gain switch over to the least sensitive position you are able to bring the gain up here and run the product in a very comfortable game range then moving over to the right we have a three position bass boost in a three position treble boost switch so these are basically EQ settings but they're not just any eq's central's took a long time to formulate the precise EQ curves that would be necessary to bring to life the sound of a variety of headphones the best headphones to go along with this product aside from a variety of IMS are hot headphones like oh disease headphones like Sennheiser's headphones like bio dynamics headphones like high finance our products previous products such as DAC port and DAC mini have taught us what our customers really want in a portable product that port is a is a $300 USB DAC that plugs into any laptop and has a headphone output on the other side we really learned what people wanted to see in products like this in the portable DAC products in terms of output level and headphone compatibility and with a hifi mate we're taking that experience one level up we're really giving you flexibility and impedance control flexibility and level control flexibility in tone shaping and also most importantly the two inputs so the last switch that I will describe here for you today is the power switch and that's which really has the left position which is the iphone the right position which is the USB and the middle position which is the off position this product is supposed to be shipping in just a couple of months and we're very excited about the potential hifi mate is positioned at 699 95 and we have several different versions planned version with without the iphone connector and instead the spit of connector etc check our website at WM transcom for all of the options and a pretty extensive amount of information you can read about the project about the design you can read the blog that we've been posting daily that chronicled the development of the product and our philosophy that you know of all the thinking that went into making this product or reality