FiiO Jade Audio JA11 Dongle DAC and Headphone Amp (Black)

Very impressive little DAC / Amp, especially for the miniscule price tag. As soon as I heard a few seconds of playback it was night and day compared to my integrated sound card in my laptop. Spacious stereo imaging that expands past the headphones even with closed backs. It was like a veil had been lifted sound quality wise with bags more treble detail and less sibilant than before. The bass is equally impressive on all the headphones I tried and it drove my sennheiser HD25 to ear bleeding levels. Most impressive is that it drives my 80ohm DT 990 Pro's to a more than adequate volume with no distortion and tight solid bass. In windows I could select 32 bit and over 192000 khz. For 10 quid you can't go wrong!

The DAC is excellent but needs to be updated with latest firmware because of crackling sound with latest iPhone. Once I’d done that it worked fine, and supports high resolution audio. I’ve bought one for my friend.

Mine started constantly disconnecting after just a week of use. The cover on the cable then started coming away. I've loved other fiio products but this is just ludicrously bad quality. Please avoid or you may regret it.

For the price you cant get better. Some noise when connected to phone using iems. The sound, however, is very very good. Perfect even.

If you are reading this review for reassurance, just BUY THIS DAC! For the money, it is better than the moondrop dawn I have and other more expensive DACs that I've used. It's so cheap for the quality it provides, small and convenient and the app function is excellent! For anyone looking for a DAC to use their IEMs with their smart phone, buy this. For application and EQing, buy this. To power more consuming headphones....buy this. It looks great too, black with a braided type cable with red detail (which matches my red case and IE200 IEMs) and is small enough to fit into headphones carry pouch. EQ on app is great, presets are good but it's customisable and gives gain control. No background noises and sound is excellent. Fits really well into USB C connection with no connection issues. Supports in line mics too which is a bonus. If I were to loose it would buy this or try it's big brother, the KA11 which is a little pricier. Try this before buying more expensive equipment and you'll be very happy.

You get a lot of DAC/Amp here for only £10! These are 30mW per channel with near-zero impedance, which will be perfectly fine for pretty much any in-ear monitor (IEM) and will not distort the tuning of your IEM of choice. Over-ear headphones however may require something a bit more gutsy than this depending on what you're trying to run, so keep this in mind before buying this. There were, as reported by several reviews here, some issues with the v1.9 firmware update. These were swiftly corrected in another update, so make sure you're updating to v2.0 and skip over the faulty update if you choose to update. I did this and had no problems afterwards. The only issue with this dongle is that it cannot automatically switch between UAC1/UAC2 as required, and has to be set manually. Devices are one or the other and connections will fail if you use the incorrect protocol for the device you're trying to connect to. The JA11 defaults to the more modern UAC2, and so long as your device is also UAC2 everything works fine. If you're having trouble getting the dongle to connect to your device of choice, you will first need to switch modes in the FiiO Control app. This control app also lets you access the five-band Parametric EQ (PEQ) on the on-board DAC chip. This is an amazing feature to include on a £10 product! The stuff of dreams even a few years ago. This is disabled by default (as it should be) but if the tuning of your IEM is not to your liking, now you can fix that. There is also a basic volume control on the app, which acts as a volume throttle in case you're concerned that you will accidentally blow your ears out with these as even this basic device can get your gear *very* loud. Otherwise there's little to discuss here: it Just Works so long as the dongle is in the correct mode for your device. A very handy value add for your IEM of choice.

EXCELLENT AND COMPACT

Didn't last very long before it started disconnecting frequently, making it unusable. I have bought 3 of them the first lasting around 6 months, other two lasted less than a week. I feel the quality of this adapter in particular has gone down hill.