I did tonight testing of 6 configurations:
- Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC
- Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC 2.1
- Audiophonics ES9018K2M DAC
- without and without Allo Kali reclocker
Summary:
- All three DACs work perfectly fine with Allo Kali reclocker
- The best DAC is Audiophonics ES9018K2M both with and without Allo Kali reclocker
- The best surprise is Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC that has major sound quality improvement with the Kali reclocker, while being worst without it
All tests are subjective listening tests of two persons of two very different tracks in 94-24 (Audiophile jazz prologue III vocal - You’ve Got a Fried, and Sonic’s Mad audiophile sampler pop - Love will save the day).
I spread 1 to 6 ratings across configurations with 6 being the best and 1 being the worst
DAC: w/o reclocker vs. with reclocker
Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC : 1 vs. 4
Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC 2.1: 2 vs. 3
Audiophonics ES9018K2M DAC: 5 vs. 6
Listing comments:
- Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC - without reclocker has very flat, metallic sound and no bass, but that has dramatic improvement with the reclocker gaining massive dynamics and pleasant transparency, very wide stereo - becoming 2nd best configuration
- Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC 2.1 - without reclocker has flat, harsh electric sound with explicit middle and high frequencies, with the reclocker gaining transparency and dynamics but overall having minor improvement and staying almost as low in performance as without the reclocker
- Audiophonics ES9018K2M - has 5% lower total volume than Allo DACs, without reclocker has great natural voice and soft sound with good bass, with the reclocker increasing dynamics with focused sound stage and detailed reproduction of clearly distinguished of low, mid, and high frequencies - very pleasant listening, more focused and narrow stereo the both Allo DACs
Conclusion 1, even Audiophonics ES9018K2M set-up is very cumbersome and user unfriendly (HW installation requires connecting one loose wire plus need to find one more to build a bridge of IR pin to +5V, no driver support from chipmaker, no proper documentation of the product, currently false marketing of 384 kHz playback capabilities, extra SW installation and configuration required to work around driver shortcomings with serial synchronization of 16bit playback), and Audiophonics customer service almost non-exiting, this is the best DAC, and can be perfectly used without, or with Allo reclocker just slightly increasing the audio quality
Conclusion 2, for users who don’t have time to loose and look for the audio quality, the best simple out of box solution is Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC with Allo Kali reclocker
Conclusion 3, stay away from Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC 2.1 that is average performing DAC in any configuration - without Allo Kali reclocker, or with the Allo Kali reclocker having no real improvement, while being sold at substantially high price, and not having integrated headphone AMP as Allo Piano Hi-Fi DAC, also unclear need of subwoofer filtering in the DAC (not speaking of extra SW requirements to manage it)
Janis
P.S. I don’t have these DACs - HiFiBerry and IQaudIO (Zero I don’t consider), and haven’t reviewed them, but you can find reviews of these products in Hans Beekhuyzen Channel on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1f-4iAveOg
If I read it correctly - they are not as good as old Audiophonics SABRE V3 DAC, which according to my reviews was worse that both Allo DACs, not speaking of the new Audiophonics ES9018K2M.
@ALLO_audio_boards and @Audiophonics are welcome to comment