FiiO has been a nostalgic soul of late, having released a Walkman-inspired portable cassette player and a Discman-esque portable CD player into a world that waved goodbye to those audio devices many moons ago. The digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) is one of the more contemporary audio devices in the Chinese manufacturer’s portfolio today, but it has still managed to give its latest one a retro flair: the all-new KA15 is a portable DAC that resembles a tape recorder – and not only in its compact cuboidal shape but also with its one-inch colour screen’s graphic interface. And we thought British brand iFi was the king of cool DAC designs!
FiiO makes several portable USB DACs, from the USB-C KA13 to the Bluetooth-enabled BTR13 – all with the purpose of being the sound-enhancing middleman between your phone or laptop and headphones. The KA15 shares that ambition, its conversion stage built around two Cirrus Logic CS43198 chips that support 32-bit/768kHz PCM and DSD256 files.
