A bespoke audiophile tube DAC: measurements and discussions. And politics season, a low point.

As per the title and image, this post will be a nebulous one because we're not looking at an easily-accessible mass produced product. 🤔

The reason is because we're looking at what appears to be a one-of-a-kind device that's not advertised, the company making it doesn't have any web presence with only a handful of posts I can find over the decades referencing the company/person who makes what appears to be typically tube-based products.

I came across this unit from an audiophile friend who commissioned this designer/maker for a good sounding DAC with tubes. This was what he got; the first iteration at least.

As you can see, it's a 2-box unit with identical metal chassis except for some cut-out differences for the volume control in the DAC section, a 6.35mm headphone jack (not pretty!), and digital input selector (coax, optical, USB). We can see the tubes sticking up from the DAC box. The box below is the (presumably linear) power supply with its own power button and a "dummy" knob that I guess is just part of the generic case.

I was told that the DAC chip inside is the ESS ES9038Q2M which we've explored previously like here and here.

The boxes are metal and of basically identical size: ~7.5" x 13" x 3". The DAC box is quite light, about 1.95kg, and the power supply weighs a bit more at 2.5kg.

FiiO K11 R2R DAC: Affordable R-2R desktop DAC & headphone amp. Let's talk about R-2R and euphonic preferences.

It has been more than a year since I last measured or reviewed a DAC!

To be honest, in 2026, DACs are IMO boring from the perspective of expecting any sonic progress when it comes to high-fidelity audio. They are very much a "solved problem" and will not pose any challenge for the audiophile who desires accuracy. Unless there's some new technology to evaluate or must-have features, digital-to-analogue conversion has clearly matured to allow extremely high resolution playback - perceptibly perfect even - within reach of basically everyone in the last decade.

[In the big cultural-level picture, I think we're at the phase now with less expensive products (eg. Chi-Fi) where more than adequate function has been achieved and we're going to be seeing an emphasis on "Design-Driven Innovation" where emotional, symbolic, and esthetic significance become more important with each generation for product differentiation. I think we're already seeing this with the FiiO line-up as I describe related products to this at the end of this post. In time, I suspect this will be an existential threat to many current High-End brands.]

Because of that lack of excitement around evaluating yet another DAC objectively, for more than 6 months now, this FiiO K11 R2R DAC (US$176, Canada link) has been sitting on my table for evaluation! 🙄 I bought this with the plan of using it in my office at the hospital for desktop speaker playback and headphone listening which I'll do after publishing this.

Make sure not to confuse this model with the slightly less expensive FiiO K11 non-R2R DAC (US$145) which uses the Cirrus Logic CS43198 chip. Feature-wise, I think they're very similar and look identical other than the stylized "R2R" stamped on the top of the case.

Okay, let's put this through its paces...

MUSINGS: On imagination, fantasies, transcendence, and balance in audiophile play. And an AI-assisted analysis of audio hardware discussions in September 2026.

Since I started this blog, I've used the tagline "A 'more objective' take for Audiophiles" (later adding the word Rational). This was intentional because back in the early 2010s, the environment was quite different than today. At that time, computer audiophilia was primarily about playback of local music libraries on hard drives (collapse of NAND flash drive prices for SSD in mid-2012 soon allowed 500+GB SSDs), prior to the massive expansion of online streamed audio (Spotify launched in mid 2011 in N. America, lossless Tidal not until late 2014). In those days, we also didn't have anything like the expansive high-fidelity "Chi-Fi" hardware options we have today. These products have tremendously brought down the cost of literally everything in the audio chain. While DACs have been high performance devices for ages already (some history here), others like reasonably priced Class D amps (Hypex UcD launched 2003, nCore 2011, very inexpensive TI TPA32xx "chip" amps by 2016) came out later, and today are ubiquitous (like this, and this, and this). The availability of Raspberry Pi and similar devices have made bit-perfect digital end-points easy and cheap to build. These products have commoditized high fidelity in ways I think should be welcomed by all audiophiles.

Not only has availability of hardware changed (and concomitantly necessary software), but I'm glad to see that in the last decade, the modern audiophile who's getting started in this hobby now has easy access on the web to a lot of information including better objective analyses and subjective opinions/preferences. I think the environment today is a much better mix of technological understanding that can be used to quite easily refute nonsensical mysticism while at the same time rationally discuss human subjective preferences.

Compared to the early 2010's, the media landscape has changed so significantly from what used to be mostly unchallenged narratives driven by the old "magazines of record" like Stereophile and The Absolute Sound; nowadays these sites have sheltered themselves with no discussion forums to leave comments on, and even old comments accumulated over years have been purged (changes as recent as 2025)! As far as I can tell, the magazines these days have little ability to offer deep insights beyond articles acting as proxy advertisements.

With these changes, the "more objective" part of my tagline I think has already become much of mainstream audiophile discourse and culture. And so I was contemplating the other day whether we're already at a comfortable balance now between subjectivity and objectivity among hobbyists.

As humans, it seems like balance is one of the hardest things to achieve. I see audiophilia as a safe microcosm to view other aspects of life like politics. As in politics, it's all too easy to be drawn to extremes. In fact, the modern liberal freedoms we enjoy and the progress we've made have been based on the "dynamic equilibrium" as a central defining pillar. For us audiophiles, balance likewise is a necessary foundation to satisfy questions surrounding what devices we buy and also why we choose the audiophile hobby as our area of interest in the first place.

Frustration of the Euphonophile Salesman. Audiophile evaluation methods & intentions.

Through February 2025, and with today's third post of the month, I've been exploring the current audiophile culture with videos from contemporary YouTube channels. While never exactly the same among participants, we can see "archetypal" characteristics shared among personalities in this hobby.

We've talked about the technical channel that presented facts but also blurs boundaries into unusual beliefs to make sales and justify products, the subjective-only hobbyist channel willing to do listening tests (great!), and today let's talk about the audiophile who appears to insist on purely subjective-based evaluation, rejects objective measurements, and is a salesman in the Industry.

I'm talking about OCD Hi-Fi Guy who's quite an entertaining fellow. He calls it like he sees it - "no BS" - I can respect that to a point. His name is Mike "Mikey" Powell and he runs a company called 11 Stereo. His followers are known as the "HiFi Tribe" and in the videos, we see promotions of the companies and products that he represents including Playback Designs DACs and Fischer & Fischer speakers, prominently mentioned among others. 

Every once awhile you'll see on my blog a reference to something on his channel that I found entertaining - like this post addressing the interview with Machina Dynamica guy. His use of diction suggests an intelligent fellow but I suspect he comes across a bit "spicy" in his language for many audiophile gentlemen and gentleladies. At other times, some of his viewpoints around politics and towards other cultures might be unpalatable.

If you watch his videos, I think it becomes quite clear that his moniker is inaccurate because he is neither "OCD" (his answers are far from perfectionistic), nor is his philosophy towards audio particularly "Hi-Fi" (high fidelity). Let's have a deeper look at this with a recent video that's entertaining, yet highlights the frustration that I think some salesmen might experience online these days as they try to assert unsubstantiated beliefs.

MUSINGS: On Being an Audiophile, Rationality, and Respectability (Thoughts on the Hardware Audiophile Hobby)

For the post today, I thought it would be interesting to take a step back from my usual measurements and various objective explorations and spend some time thinking about the "audiophile" hobby; you know - the big picture.

For some, the idea of "rational audiophilia" as suggested in the image above might sound oxymoronic. After all, anyone who spends thousands of dollars and hours upon hours of time on audio toys in an obsessional fashion is at the very least "neurotic" and somewhat irrational. One could spend his/her time working hard to make more money, spend time with family, read a good book, enjoy a play, take a vacation, go exercising... All of which depending on the situation potentially more worthwhile and healthier.