FiiOKA17 High End Dongle Amplifier with Dual ES9069 DACs (Blue)

I have used th FiiO 15,15i,and 18, fine portables, and many others over the years, but having tried, and now purchased the KA17, I have I sold them. 17 has a better wider and deeper soundstage, voices sound natural, bass is deep, little to no bleed up into the lower mids, and the included case is a nice touch. Excellent value for money. Like anything else, it all depends on the equipment you use it with. Recommended.

I have been away from the 'audiophile' game for 2.5 years, listened to music from my AirPods 2 Pro and on my Hifi (pretty good one)... Previously I have been using a desktop amp to drive over ear headphones and even a Khadas Tea, this drove my Aryas pretty ok, not the best but find.2.5 Years later and these new USB C, powerful dongle docs have come a looooong way. When I plugged this little thing into my phone and headphones, I was initially concerned that it didnt seem to be as powerful or loud as I was reading... Then I realised I had the volume on my phone at 25%...Putting my phone volume on 100, and engaging desktop mode I couldnt really go above 50% volume on thee KA17 before I feared for my hearing. That, is nuts. The Khadas tea would need to be turned up to full volume and still wouldnt be as powerful.Impressive. Clean sound, nothing to report at all. Just makes music sound the way it should.

Amazing

I got the latest iPad pro and was in the market for a dongle dac.I've had a few FiiO products in the past including headphones and daps and I find them to be really good for the price.I use this with some Sundara closed (low gain, desktop mode) and on max volume it's more than enough, with high gain it will be more so. I'm using 4.4mm connection. I've used with iems as well and there was no background hiss - perfectly silent, at least with FiiO Fh3 and 4.4mm connection.Sound quality is really good - they've squeezed in a lot of good components, particularly for the price. I won't go into the details here - ultimately it's very good for the price, it's not going to best my Mojo 2...but it's close enough.Firmware upgrade is a pain on a Mac. The instructions given on the site don't correlate to the 2.0 firmware upgrade process so you need to have a little faith that you did the upgrade correctly - thankfully, I did. This is frustrating because FiiO are a very respectable company now that are genuinely producing quality hardware and making their own path in the audiophile world.I used the Eq via the 2.0 firmware method which provides a web page UI. All is well, however in desktop mode I get cutouts when eq is active and playing 192khz music, everything below is fine. Turning eq off and it's all fine. It's possible I need a higher power external power source, not sure - I'm using a powerbank. I turned eq off as a result.

The Fiio Ka17 is another example of an excellent product from the company. As it uses the latest ESS Sabre DAC chips (ESS 9069) which sound excellent, you are guaranteed fantastic sound quality. The unit can also be powered from an external USB C charger or power bank which allows it to deliver more power to the headphones when used in desktop mode. it also has a choice of different digital filters which allow subtle and very fine tuning of the sound to taste. Overall I would say that for around £120 you are getting a digital sound that would have cost a small fortune to obtain just a few years ago.

Fantastic dongle.works great with my samsung s23. Hooked up to my hifiman arya organic.very happy.would strongly recommend.

I ended up returning this USB DAC. The sound was very powerful and detailed but the device got too hot for comfort during use and occasionally locked up and became unresponsive. The only way to solve that was to unplug it an leave it to cool down for 15 minutes, not ideal if you want to use it then. It also produced an unpleasantly loud popping noise through the headphones when changing between modes sometimes, which might damage your ears and your headphones.

Absolutely fantastic DAC for my headphones goes extremely loud for inefficient efficient earphones lots of different sound tuning features the only negative I can think of is the instructions and clear but the sound is outstanding for the money. I don’t think it can be better.