I’ve spent the last several months reviewing a small mountain of gear — pocket dongles, budget desktop boxes, flagship ladder DACs, planars, wireless flagships — and one uncomfortable question has been circling the whole time. If a Bluetooth device the size of a matchbook can drive my planars properly, what exactly is the desk full of separates for?
Violectric doesn’t chase spec-sheet arms races the way the Chinese DAC/amp makers do — it builds amplifier circuits descended from the genuinely revered V200 and V280 series and wraps them in casework machined to a standard most of this category doesn’t bother with. The DHA V226 is the entry point into that world, and “entry point” here still means a £1,230 desktop centrepiece.
FiiO has spent years building the K-series into the default desktop DAC/amp recommendation, but the K17 R2R is a different animal — it throws out the delta-sigma chip entirely and builds its own resistor ladder instead. That’s a serious, expensive engineering decision for a company that could have just bought another ESS part off the shelf, and it signals FiiO wants to be taken seriously above the price bracket it built its name in.
Topping built its reputation on the idea that measurements matter more than marketing, and the DX5 II is that philosophy poured into a £299 box. It’s a DAC, a headphone amp and a preamp in one, and it arrives with enough clean power on tap that I had to double-check the price. This is the kind of product that makes the mid-tier desktop DAC/amp market genuinely awkward for everyone above it.
Topping has a habit of turning up in a price bracket and quietly resetting what’s expected there, and the DX1 II — landing in the UK this summer at £119 via Electromod — is the latest example. No power brick, no fuss, just a small aluminium box that pulls everything it needs from USB-C and still finds over a watt of balanced output on the other end.
The budget desktop DAC/amp category used to mean picking your compromise. FiiO’s K11 is the point where that stops being true: a sub-£110 box that puts out more power than desktop amps twice its price, wrapped in a chassis that actually looks like it belongs on a desk rather than apologising for being there.
The hip-dac has always been the fun one — that gaudy copper-and-black shell, the glowing volume knob, the sense that iFi didn’t take itself too seriously even while the electronics inside were dead earnest. Three generations in, the joke’s worn off and what’s left is a genuinely accomplished USB DAC/amp that happens to still look like nothing else on your desk. It’s not chasing the BTR17 or the Mojo 2 on outright spec-sheet bragging rights; it’s chasing “you’ll actually use this every day,” and it mostly wins.
FiiO’s dongle line has quietly turned into a technology testbed, and the KA17 is where the ambition goes furthest. No Bluetooth radio, no screen gimmicks for their own sake — just two flagship DAC chips, a dedicated power port, and a Desktop Mode that genuinely means it. Having just spent weeks with the BTR17, its wireless sibling from the same generation, the KA17 is the wired, no-compromise answer to the same question: how much desktop-grade amplification can you cram into something that lives on a keyring?