Outboard DACs

Search online and you’ll discover a groundswell of cheap DACs and streamers playing to every (hardware) whim, making it easy to overlook Eversolo’s efforts. But the company, which is the dedicated audio department of Shenzhen-based Zidoo, known for its EISA Award-winning Neo S media player, follows a different, more quality-focused strategy, as the affordable Z8 DAC and DMP-A6 have so far proved.

The name of this new product from Polish company HEM, selling under its Ferrum brand, is spelt ERCO, but pronounced 'ertso'. Apparently it's Esperanto for 'ore', and so follows on from the mineral-based brand-identity – Ferrum, OOR – you get the idea. What's also not immediately apparent, given that all the Ferrum products basically look the same, is that the £2395 ERCO is perhaps the most comprehensively equipped model the company has made to date.

Obviously not afraid of a spot of (Russell?) crowing, Oslo-based Hegel describes its new Reference H590 integrated amp, just going on sale at £9000, as ‘Master and Commander’. Apparently it’s ‘A master at musicality’ and ‘The commander of any set of speakers’. Mind you, you might be tempted to forgive the company for its exuberance – after all, the new arrival is something of a monster, standing an AV-receiver-challenging 17.1cm tall, tipping the scales at 22kg and delivering over 300W per channel. Well, 301W a side actually, according to Hegel, making it at least 50% more powerful than its previous top integrated, the H360.

ARose by any other name? As has happened in the past, Korean manufacturer HiFi Rose has launched a new version of an existing model – in this case its RS250 network player – with worthy specification changes and a suffix to set the two apart. But there's a mild inconsistency here, for when the company upgraded the RS150 [HFN Jun '21] to the current version, due to a DAC chip change forced upon the company by the 2020 fire at AKM's semiconductor plant in Japan, it became the RS150(B), selling for £3899, but the revised RS250 is now the £2349 RS250A, available in either silver or black finishes.

With its wide range of portable, battery-powered DACs and headphone amplifiers, few companies have done as much as iFi Audio to improve listening on the hoof. Yet the new iDSD Diablo 2, its latest range-topping model and a replacement for the iDSD Diablo of 2021, pushes the envelope of the mobile DAC/amp genre, both by being far from budget at £1299, and large enough for its manufacturer to deem it more 'transportable' than genuinely 'pocket-size'.

Seemingly there's no stopping Southport-based iFi Audio: it just keeps on trotting out new digital products, all aiming to fill a gap in the market – or create a new gap to fill. Indeed, while writing this review I was unsurprised to see another new launch pop up, in the form of the bright red iDSD Diablo.