Gadgetory

today we have a very special review I've compiled together a total of nine different portable ish Dax that I have at my disposal here all in one place at one time very cool opportunity I thought I would give you guys my thoughts the good thing about these Dax is for the most part they follow their price point in terms of quality so a lot of the cheaper Dax very good for the price and as you go up features kind of differ but for the most part the quality increases proportional to the cost incurred now it's not a straight curve obviously something that costs two times more is not usually two times better but it is better than something that costs less than it so that's a pretty nice feature about these particular Dax that I have together here for you I'm going to take you guys through these Dax they're actually set up the cheapest ones on the left to the most expensive on the right and I'm going to give you a quick rundown of each one the first tech I want to tell you guys about is down here on the left it's called the Cadillacs coffee this deck runs around two hundred and fifty dollars it features a lot of different controls on the top part it has a headphone output as well as your standard RCA analogs this other side is just supplied via the power of this USB acts as a computer deck for the most part the sound I found pretty good I really enjoyed it I think that you're going to get the best out of this through the analog the headphone out is OK for the sides but it's not quite enough to power really big headphones as you can imagine it's a pretty standard volume DAC that works well for E in ear monitors this deck is cigar shaped it's the deck port LX by Centron it's also supplied for portable device through computers to this USB the power is supplied there and it goes up to 24 96 very good DAC also 250 dollars just the single output on this one you cannot plug headphones into this so there's no headphone amplifier I found the sound of this one to be very good very smooth in the mids and indecent for the price 250 this is the R cam RPAC so basically the same kind of setup as the calyx coffee except that it has just a volume supply on the top there is a headphone output the back contains the same type of power supply through the USB and an analog output this does not I have a battery in as well none of these ones I've shown so far are supplied by a battery so all the power needs to come to the usb I found this DAC to be quite good all three of these previous ones kind of are in the same league as far as sound quality is concerned I found however I did find the headphone jack on this to be less than ideal it will definitely suffice for in ears but once again not something that you can really kick but with big headphones and look for a really big headphones sound unfortunately so in this one is 250 as well this one here has quite a bit of hype around it is the audioquest dragonfly so the smallest one of the group it lands in around 250 you can see you can see here that it is simply the size of a USB stick I've done a full review on this in the past I really enjoy this one I do think that the output line quality that you plug into here is just a hair above the rest of these groupings the other Dax in this category don't quite have the lifelike recreation that this one does it's very unique in that this little dragonfly lights up in different colors based upon what kind of signal you're feeding it so you kind of get an idea of what you're actually listening to as far as bit rates and resolution quality is concerned the headphone jack also is a line out for the device and I found that to be pretty good too on equal par with the quality so not something you can drive I mean this will drive full side full-size headphones but still I think for best results an external headphone amplifier but it will act pretty good for 250 to even your line out stereo as we move up the scale now we're going to go to a bigger price jump but I'm glad to say with this next one we also see the same kind of bump up in quality which is great this one is called the apex glacier it's a relatively new one from Todd the vinyl junkie TT VJ is his name and he has done something quite different as you can see with this it runs around $500 it is quite a bit sleeker and smaller this does actually contain an internal battery for you to use so it will go ahead and tap right into anything portable you can take this with you whenever you want you can see it there is a bit of a deviation from the other controls but this one has a very cool lights that lets you know what's going on with the volume like that I don't know if you can see that but it is pretty cool a little bit different than a lot of the other ones push on push off the back features a mini USB jack one for charging and one for the DAC so you know exactly what you're getting out of each one there's also gain switch it back there and then an input for analog line ins this has a 96 20 24 96 DAC built in that I thought was really good it the quality is outstanding for this in here monitor listening right up there with a lot of the other big guys I really enjoyed this one it does have enough juice to power a pair of LCD 3s through the internal DAC it was pretty good juice on this one compared to the other guys in this category I mean the gain is just kind of up there from the rest great sound quality definitely a bump up in DAC and amplifier quality than this group here this is 250 this is where 500 starts the next one I have here is the pan M by alo audio now as you can see this one is not really extremely portable it started out at 600 but I believe it's at 500 right now at the website but this I would like to say this is an external power supply which does add to the sound quality in my opinion but it also costs another two hundred dollars more so bare-bones 500 but realistically more like seven or 800 by the time you're done with it if you really want to get the best out of it you can see that it actually incorporates tube in the input stage but the output stage is still op amp but that in fact gives this thing a pretty good sonic signature with with amazing power there's a high low gain here and on high it will definitely push a pair of LCD threes to whatever level you desire so it's pretty good as a headphone amplifier this thing is outstanding now the DAC is fairly good - very good I would say for the price point the amplifier really can't be beat in my opinion with the tube stage in it added in there this thing sounds very very sweet well thinking about I have noticed over time however is that vocal presentations tend to be a little forward so if that is your bag then this is definitely the amp for you if it's not your bag then maybe another one will be just as good but the end I father foes to be just a touch forward but all of the other rendering especially the base texture very very nice very very warm as you move up the chain this thing has a couple more inputs and outputs obviously we have both type of headphones jacks here but on the back you can see we start to have you know more of like a regular headphone amp kind of setup this is for the DAC it is powered through this and powered through this this is the battery supply the USB DAC here then the small input and then regular RCA is all selected by this rotating switch here so it's starting to get a little bit more features you might find you know just for like as far as straight headphone amp features but it is portable I mean this is all you need to go connected to a computer and you're ready so for a home office setup this one is actually really nice because it's got a lot of features I kind of just work in a little compact pet pack however unlike this you can't really strap it to a foam per se this one will accept you know output from through a line out jack into the back of this from your Apple device and you can just strap it right to it maybe strap it to your phone this one obviously can't do that as well so this is just a little bit more portable obviously in this one but it sounds a little bit sweeter on this so it's kind of a trade off this one we have next is the Emmaline intruder from Ray Samuels Audio raised on a really good job with this one it's very unique in the fact that it has balanced inputs and outputs balanced inputs and outputs here by a 4-pin jack as you can see the actual channels are completely separate you have separate selectors for the input USB to the line in here single ended or balanced there's the USB connection and then you can do the four pin out to a balanced headphone that's pretty unique not any of these other guys really do balanced connections and this is where to say the least you can actually partner this up with the algorithms so low DB here and you're starting to get you know kind of more like a high-end stereo setup with balanced and unbalanced connections I found the juice from this very powerful now especially through balanced mode there's like more juice than I think almost you know not more juice than any headphone could handle but it it's it's big it's loud one of the loudest amps probably on here when it's in the balanced mode with a single ed mode still great great power there's three there's a three switch selector here so this thing for versatility if you like in ear monitors it the lowest one is right perfect in the area for any air monitors that being this is sound soft and as you turn up this is about half way and it goes all the way here so what I'm saying is instead of having just a tiny little swing with a lot of the other amps for in-ear monitors where it goes from very quiet to very loud in just a small turn this one actually gives you a perfect kind of sweep from low to high across the knob when you listen to unit in here in your monitors that just happens you know it's just so nice to kind of have that versatility it's just a very smooth transition and volume as you go up so this one pretty unique this DAC however just tops out at 16 48 so it does not do the high res file transfer from the deck but that being said balanced input you can line it with another DAC and you're going to get some pretty sweet sound especially through the balanced connections that let's bring it to this here the cipher labs algorithms solo dB this is an exclusive DAC also battery-powered this is battery-powered as well it runs for around $700 as well but this is just for the DAC section obviously but then again one of the best sounds from a DAC as well it really shines in that department this one as I said before includes the balanced output so that is very rare too for a portable device they used to have one called the algorithm solo and didn't have the DB and it did not have this output as well this one also now plugs into your computer and I found the sound from the computer to be exceptionally great very very good stuff as I said before balanced output coaxial output as well in case you want to run this from your computer into here via USB then you can run this out to your favorite deck somewhere else the USB input here solid switches very cool the next deck I have here it's a little bit of a departure I would not consider the centrist deck mini that I have here to be by any means considered portable it's in the shape of a Mac Mini so you could rest one essentially right on top of here I did want to bring it up as it isn't the seat in the sentence family as you know this one has a lot more features with this right here it rotates between inputs if I turn this around you can see that has quite a bit more inputs it's more of like a stereo oriented device as well as a headphone device optical in coaxial in analog in if you want to just run headphones in from some other source so you can access just the headphone amplifier and USB connectivity it does do the high-res up to 96 not the full but 90 96 via this port and it is very nice as well it's very smooth and does a great job just as a DAC the headphone is powerful you can actually soup up this model on the website if you want to make it even more powerful with more gain on they're not the best for in-ear monitors the gains a little high like I said but for full headphones you can definitely rock and roll with that unit as well as far as connectivity to Apple devices and Android I did find that this device the apex glacier and the intruder by RSA audio did connect to my galaxy 3 phone which is pretty cool because then you can just slap this on in like a sandwich and go this one is one of the few ones that actually does it with an Apple device is you get connects directly to an Apple device and then decodes it internally the rest of these for the most part you can access it through a lineout cable and but the internal jack of the iPod or I device needs to do the decoding this one does it in-house inside this thing which is a really nice feature and it is a slight upgrade in a lot of cases to the sound but Android devices I mean we don't let those guys feel left out but these two do you have that capability this one however does not do the galaxy 3 Android devices this one does Apple devices like the iPad through the iPad camera connection kit so I don't want to leave that out that works so a lot of these other ones they can't go through the phone because they require power from the device and that unfortunately negates them as being compatible with an i device so that's the rundown I hope you guys enjoyed it it's a pretty good swath of what's available right now and I got to tell you this is a really good time to be in the portable audio and just Dax in general because this is evolving constantly what we see here and new products are coming out and new technologies are coming out and everything is changing really quickly so it's a good time to be into this kind of hobby if you enjoy it let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments section of 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