IÂd not hang my hat on one poor review . Or reviews in particular. But the Hiface gizmo has gotten loads of positive comments from a lot of folks in lots of places! Here as well, if you check the archives.
Given it's near nothing cost, I'd recommend you go get one and see for yourself.
Whichever interface you wind up with, be it Hiface, it's newer more expensive, and more fully featured sibling, The "EVO", or some other one altogether... you're not going to be out much if anything. Tweek Geek has a money back policy and they are the N American distrib's for M2Tech.
in the CA review Chris said he used an Esoteric something or other... CDP? and some more upscale DACs like the Berkely and Weiss. $5K & $6K respectively to elicit his results. personally, I feel either that particular Hiface unit was a bad piece, or there was some remarkably poor mismatch in synergy somewhere in amongst all of his systems pieces for the Hiface to reveal anything like what was described in that article. Cabling?
it was easy enough to see something was surely up with the way that account was written in general... as well as how the Hiface was subjectively said to have operated. Vieled? soft? Dark? The Hiface possesses none of those characteristics given my own uses and interpertations of it's performance... not even remotely!
Merely pay attention to which driver you download as they are OS dependant. Macs use this or that, XP & older uses this and Win 7 & Vista use some other and one older version is available for Vista & 7 if the current one doesnÂt work well with J River MC 14 or later. I needed to use the previous Hiface driver for Vista & 7, as the current release wasnÂt working well with River Media Center. But all other media players had no troubles at all . ONLY MC 14 on my various pcs and then only with vistaÂs WASAPI output.
The Hiface BNC is what I use and itÂs a real bargain unit and a real overachiever!
BTW2 the BNC or RCA cable you affix to it, does matter.
Do look into the EVO BTW but good luck regardless your pick.. or your path.
