Bitzie first impressions

Fatmangolf wrote: I plugged the loan Bitzie DAC and USB cable into my work computer to burn it in and Windows loaded a driver straightaway. I had a quick listen to some lossess files I had with me. They, and therefore the Bitzie, sounded great through my Klipsch X10's. I showed a colleague who commented on the small size and neatness of the Bitzie.   Some hours later I connected the Bitzie to my home PC with the Bitzie USB cable. Straight forward auto-install of software to enable listening to start. The music came through with the clarity and full sound I am used to with other top hi-fi I have heard. It is a fine USB DAC with excellent sound quality reflecting the digital and analogue sections being very good. It is one of the most natural sounding DAC's I have heard, I can hear every instrument and sound clearly, with no harshness/"glare" and the music is listenable.   Bitzie includes a very good headphone output. It drove my X10's to high levels, my HD280's went pretty loud and so did my LCD-2's which are less sensitive but very good orthodynamic headphones.   Connection to my hi-fi amps and speakers was easy with the enclosed adaptor. The same clear and involving sound made the music I played sound great. Room filling sound with a wide and deep soundstage, in short as big as the recordings! It is hard to believe it is a USB DAC.   I haven't used the Bitzie's SPDIF output yet but it's a real bonus to have a USB to SPDIF thrown-in, especially with galvanic isolation.   As I wrote last night: it is excellent.

Wow Bob, I've been sitting here for the last hour or so thinking about the Bitzie and looking through previous posts about how it would connect to my laptop/hifi. You have pretty much answered my questions. It all looks very exciting and I am looking forward to trying it out and comparing to my current arrangement.

EDIT :Sorry Jon don't know where I got Bob from!


Edited by mitch65 - 23 Feb 2013 at 12:12pm

The volume control affects both analogue outputs.I think the 3.5 mm and 1/4 inch sockets are in parallel. I could run headphones or line out from both of them, simultaneously using various adaptors. A quality 1/4 inch to left/right phono adaptor comes with the Bitzie. It's a very flexible and ingenious unit. And sounds great!

Thank you Jon, The Bitzie USB DAC seems to be doing exactly what we 'said on the can' by the looks of things.

We've had the prototypes and pre-production units working flat-out here for months as we busily tried numerous tweaks.

There's a lot of information 'not written' between the lines of digital i.c. manufacturers data sheets, but it is 'there to be read' if you get my meaning?

It makes a lot of difference once that 'non-information' is understood, and I guess it can be quite misleading to those 'still wet behind the ears'.

So I guess all those years (from 1982) spent working on other manufacturers stuff with some great electronics engineers, didn't go amiss.

Perhaps it should be a lesson to all those who 'think they can' that these data sheets are written like that for a purpose?