S9 Review - Headfonics

 The Hidizs S9 is a dongle-type balanced and single-ended capable DAC and amplifier capable of up to DSD512 and PCM 32BIT/768kHz decoding. It is priced at $109.

Disclaimer:

 The Hidizs S9 sent to us is a sample in exchange for our honest opinion. We thank the team at Hidizs for giving us this opportunity.

To read more about Hidizs products we reviewed on Headfonics click here.

Note, this review follows our new scoring guidelines for 2020 which you can read up on here.

The Hidizs S9 dongle DAC/amp is on the menu today. But how will it fare against the competition of small and adorably cute audiophile-grade DACs out there in the void? Hidizs has been cranking out product and product over the last year or so, I could not be happier.

So far, they have nailed all of their new products and I do not have anything truly negative to say about them. Let us hope this rings true with this new kid on the block.

Packaging & Accessories

 Standard box, cardboard, and nothing to boast over further. It does not come with any accessories beyond the USB cable for DAC connection usage. This is a serious problem with iOS users, not the fault of Hidizs, this is Apple’s nonsense requirements for power needs and how to actually connect Apple iPhones to this DAC.

Look at this nightmare, Android does not have this problem. I need a smaller Lightning-enabled cable. This damn thing costs $40 from Apple and I swear they should be paying me to use it for how large it is. Android users do not have this issue, just connect any old data cable right to the S9 and you are good to go.

With my setup in iOS, I have to run this Apple adapter, output that via USB male to USB C female, then have an interconnect go from that to the S9 USB C port. That is a headache…. but what is more of a headache is that no iOS cable is included in this S9 package.

USB-C was, but nothing for Apple users. I had to reference an older Hidizs product that did come with those awesome short interconnects for iOS. Why didn’t this one come with what you needed? I understand the lack of iOS OTG, but why no small iOS cable?

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