This is a review and and detailed measurements of FiiO Q1 Mark II Portable DAC and headphone amplifier. It is on a kind loan from a forum member. It retails for USD $100 from Amazon including free Prime shipping. The unit is attractively packaged and similar to build quality of Topping NX4 DSD which I used for comparison. Here you see them side by side:
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The unit has both balanced and unbalanced headphone output per above. Alas, my balanced test fixture only has XLR (damn these guys for not standardizing on one connector) so I could not test that port.Let”s get into the measurements and see how she does.MeasurementsLet”s start with our usual dashboard in high-gain mode:
Response is exceptionally well behaved and load independent. The have made a conscious choice to limit gain and hence power and distortion. There is essentially no clipping to speak of which is very unusual for headphone amplifiers. What this means that you get the same fidelity until max volume.Alas, power is very low with just 7 milliwatts at 300 ohms. Even at 33 ohm we don”t have much on hand at 62 milliwatt.Output impedance is very decent at 1.8 ohms or so:
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This compares to 0.9 ohm on Topping NX4 DSD though.Frequency response is boring which means it is good:
The FiiO Q1 Mark II nails this test with just 0.025 dB of deviation at all volume positions until the end! And this is in high-gain mode.How does it pull this off? It uses an analog volume control but it digitizes its value and then uses that digital output to set the level in both channels. A normal analog volume control would have had different values at different positions for each channel. And a rotary encoder would have no max and min detents and probably cost more. I hope this becomes the standard solution in headphone amplifiers.Listening TestsI tested the Fiio Q1 Mark II using my Hifiman HE-400i. You get no sound even in high gain below 12:00 position! It would get reasonably loud but not to my satisfaction.
The Topping NX4 DSD was in entirely different class, pushing out tons more power and authoritative bass with no distortion to speak of.I then tested the Q1 with my sensitive IEMs and there I got plenty of volume and with the help of bass boost switch, got decent amount of that without it being bothersome.ConclusionsI find no glaring faults in the design of Fiio Q1. It aims for a mid-level performance and it delivers that with no warts. It is best used with sensitive IEMs and people who like to listen to lower levels than I do. It is nicely made and has very rich format support including DSD. It has fantastic channel matching — the best I have seen I think.If you can afford an extra $50, the Topping NX4 DSD is much better performer. It has much more output, and better measured and subjective performance.In summary, the Fiio Q1 Mark II is recommended if your demands for output power is limited.As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.—–If you like this review, please consider donating funds for these types of hardware purchases using Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/vinaexpress.com.vn), or upgrading your membership here though Paypal (https://vinaexpress.com.vn/foru…eview-and-measurements.2164/page-3#post-59054).
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AmirFounder, Audio Science ReviewFounder, Madrona DigitalContributing Editor, Widescreen Review MagazineClick for My Technical BackgroundMy YouTube Channel