The audiophile obsession with LPS on everything is just ridiculous, and that all SMPS are polluting your audio chain. Any decent amp should be able to filter this out but of course they all need to upsell you something and have a reason to pay more for their supposedly cleaner devices.
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I follow this kind of „argumentation“ for over 20 years and it’s funny what I have come across during that time.
There is just a big difference in the attitude. So those who don’t care about that stuff or are not willing to spend money or even try it out - that would be perfectly fine. Unfortunately they don’t communicate openly about that rather than claiming there is no difference or any other things to justify their behavior.
Well, in reality power supply is a crucial part in every HiFi chain. I‘ve experienced a lot and relating price / performance the iFi iPower Elite is doing a very nice job.
Are there people using this out there in the wild and is the firmware holding up, I wonder?
Interestingly, most DACs do have an small amplifier section. So, in that case, his argument would actually indicate that it does make a difference to a DAC.
And I’m not saying that I think upgraded power supplies always make a difference, a lot of components will then filter and change the voltage to whatever they need.
All depends on the design of the product. And if you hear a difference, fantastic, if not, that’s fantastic too.
Mostly holding up, although I have had occasions where I cannot use the Neo’s internal dac and need to use my Mytek DAC. Also finding the network is far more stable using the good old fashioned ethernet rather than ethernet into the Neo’s Optibox.
There is a discussion on the Neo at Headfi if you are interested.
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Is anyone using the Neo Stream over i2s to a Denafrips DAC?
I am having trouble matching the the units. Can’t get DSD recognized AND proper L and Right.
Thanks.
Check Head Fi thread, I leave a link there.
WARNING: Do not install the latest beta firmware for the Neo Stream! It completely bricked my device, and I’m having to ship it to iFi for repair. It isn’t even possible to factory reset the device back to the launch firmware—it literally turns it into a doorstop. Lesson learned!
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Steven you would like to think they might have learned a lesson from the number of bricked Zen streams they have had.
At you have given an early warning now and I hope you get it fixed quickly
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Yes I noticed that the latest ZS beta says “fixed bricking of device” in the release notes!
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Yes and one of the guys on the threads had his bricked and had to return it as well.
We live in the time of dual firmware when many devices can roll back on failure to the previous good working version.
Hopefully iFi can learn some lessons from this and not annoy loyal customers like you in the future.
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I’ve always been inclined to be an early adopter, but I’m just done installing betas on iFi devices. I must admit that my Neo Stream was working fine and there was really nothing I was looking to be fixed in a beta, but with the ZS there were a ton of bugs that existed for a long time back then that kept me maintaining hope for a fix in a beta for quite awhile there.
Is everything working with the ZS now? Did it ever come out of that 2.31.8 beta cycle it was in for over a year?
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There were a new series of betas that fixes some things and Broke Roon only mode, and wouldn’t let you switch back from SPDIF after the upgrade.
I haven’t tried one in the last month as I in AIO mode.
Life has been too busy for me to break things that I might not quickly be able to fix again.
The Neo Stream seemed to be off to a good start, and has been getting great review’s, so it’s disappointing to see they have put their foot in it again.
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Well, they don’t advertise the beta option and it was my choice to go snooping into uncharted territory. Before the beta bricked it, it was terrific and working perfectly. It took a few firmware cycles to get the artwork loading correctly, but other than that it was certainly more ready for launch than the ZS was, by several thousand miles.
It seems that iFi has been focusing on consumer grade/ultra affordable releases of late, which is great—they offer an unparalleled selection of high quality, audiophile grade desktop and portable options now that are bringing high res audio to the masses—which I think is a terrific idea, especially for kids! I think back to my high school experience in the eighties and I would have killed to have had something like this product line that I could actually afford—back then the coolest things were the advent of CD players (which my friends could afford but not me) and the original Sony Walkman!
We thought cassettes sounded mind-blowing back then. If kids today only new how lucky they are…
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If I still had a cassette player, maybe my boxes full of them would sound great, but I don’t remember them sounding that good in the 80s. Now that I have a basic Vinyl deck I wish I had stuck with vinyl for the 3 or 4 years that I purchased cassette’s as it would save me buying a number of them again on vinyl (just my favourites of course as I have them all on CD). But they were portable and that won me over 
I don’t realise that you had installed a beta, it does change something’s, but they are public betas and not alpha releases so there should be some testing done before it is put out. Otherwise they should make it more difficult to join the public beta program
Hopefully you can get it back quickly and going back to enjoying it. I have looked at one but cannot justify the spend, given I already have more devices than I can use at the moment.
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Honestly Michael the only thing it offers over the ZS is the PCM 768 and DSD 512 options, for which I have no source material other than Roon’s upsampling engine—and I doubt anyone could tell the difference between 512 and 256. Or 256 and 128 for that matter! It also offers a hardware GUI that shows inferior artwork and metadata than Roon does itself, and it has an onboard DAC that I can’t comment on because I don’t use it.
But I do know that it outputs a lower voltage than my Topping d90se, and since I don’t believe that different DACs have much influence on sound quality, that voltage difference is significant enough for me to continue to bypass it.
Otherwise it stacks a bit more nicely with my other components—they all line up pleasingly now for my OCD. That’s about it. It certainly doesn’t sound any different than the ZS, they both sound identically great. So unless someone needs that integrated DAC, there’s absolutely nothing about it that warrants the extra grand over the ZS.
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Nice feedback Steven and for headphone listening I have been very happy with my Zen Stream and DAC combo and my Matrix Audio Mini-I Pro 3 (as an all in one). They both give me what I need for the time I listen on headphones.
I own a couple of DSD128 album’s and they sound amazing but agree that I almost certainly couldn’t tell the difference between DSD128 and DSD256 (forgetting DSD512 all together).
I bought them because I wanted to try some native DSD, but even the DSD128 album is between 1.5GB and 2GB in size, so I can only imagine what a DSD522 album would be like.
I like Roon upscaling to DSD128/256 for both my headphone setup’s and also in testing HQP upscaling though it requires a lot of processing power. Very happy with both options, though I have not yet pulled the trigger on a HQPLAYER purchase as I have been testing a Mac Mini and a 12th Gen i5 desktop (though truth be told, even though the desktop has more power it also has much more noise). I will probably go with the Mac Mini which will limit me to DSD256 anyway.
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Sorry to jump in the middle of conversation. 512 instead of 256, hardware gui, and the dac. There is also the optical LAN. Now I do not own Neo just the Stream (outputs to a Zen Dac v2) and I tend to think that optical or ethernet is the same but still I would like to ask about it, if you tried and if better/worse than RJ LAN
Thanks
Traian it’s used for stopping any possible noise transmitting on Ethernet and can be used anywhere that you want the cleanest possible signal as what should come back out of the other side of the optical transceiver is a clean signal (as there is no way for it to transmit over optical).
I have tried it with off the shelf TP-Link style convertors (based on a large stash of work transceivers and fibre fly lead’s available for testing) but I could hear no improvement, and I ended up with a mess of cable’s.
I think that the idea is sound, if you have noise in your Ethernet network, but based on the many review’s I have watched, no one heard a significant improvement using the fiber adapter.
I am not a naysayer, people just need to understand what is causing the noise and try and fix it (if possible), or stick with Cat 5e and Cat 6 cable’s Which should help to eliminate a lot of these.
Saying that if I had one of these devices and a cupboard to put the cable’s in I would probably still use it 
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Thank you Michael for taking the time to write this. TP-Link convertors I was thinking to try for the Zen Stream but better save the money for “a better USB cable” 
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