Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)The good:
The Fubar IV Plus's DAC is spectacular. I love the sound out of the RCA jacks. All my favorite songs sound like they have new parts for me to enjoy, and that's the highest praise that I can give to any audio product. This makes my computer audio sound wonderful.
The bad:
The isolation between the headphone amplifier and the internal digital processing circuitry is laughably bad. This manifests in a high frequency hiss that I find to be particularly distracting when listening to solo piano or other uncluttered music.
The headphone jack on this product is fairly low noise until you attach it to a digital source (you know, the obscure "using the device" thing), but then the hiss kicks in. This noise is present at all volume levels, but it seems to get substantially louder once you get past about half-volume. Even stranger, this isn't a new problem with the Fubar IV Plus; I've seen reviews of the prior three generations of this product that describe this same issue.
In response to another comment here: this doesn't appear to be an issue of noise intrusion through the power system, so it seems unlikely that the dedicated super-spiffy power box add-on will do anything to help the noise.
This noise is not present through the RCA output jacks, or at least the noise is reduced to the point where I don't notice it anymore. One proviso in this case: keep the volume knob set low... It seems that some noise still comes through if you set the volume control high (this volume knob does not adjust the level through the RCA jacks, so there's no reason to have the level anywhere but all the way down).
I've taken the audio from the stereo RCA outputs and fed it into a separate headphone amp. This isn't nearly as convenient as using the built-in headphone amp, but it sounds much better.
Again, to restate: I love the DAC in this device, it sounds wonderful. The headphone amp, not so much.
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