CEntrance DACport HD Portable 384kHz USB DSD Hi-Res DAC/Class-A Headphone Amp

I purchased the CEntrance DACPort HD few months back and main reason I wanted to buy this product was that I had earlier ordered HiFiMan HE-400i. I had read that HiFiMan is not an easily driveable HeadPhone and I was on the lookout for an DAC/AMP combination. I live in Bangalore, India and I blindly went for it after reading few reviews on internet. And am happy with the two purchases. They both really work well with each other. if you plug in your earphone/headphone to the audio out of a laptop or a Desktop you'll probably be satisfied with the sound if the earphone/headphone is good.But then you won't get the taste of what you don't know about. The external DAC/AMP as you may have read, bypasses the internal sound card of a laptop/pc. The DACPort I believe has a ASAHI Kesei chip that is renowned for it's sound quality. I would highly recommend this product to anyone that is on a hunt for a DAC/AMP. One concern is that this gets very hot while plugged in. but I have heard other class A amplifiers do get hot as well like this one.

Item came defective and I sent it back. I was about a new one and contacted CEntrance directly about warranty. I got a a quick reply from CEO saying that their warranty might not be applied to the item sold on Amazon. So the US company does not stand behind their product ??? Rather than be enchanted by "Made in USA" I have bought Yulong DAC from a Hong Kong company. Ant they do stand behind their products.

Great sound but finicky with setup. I had problems with no sound when the computer went to sleep and had to reboot to restore the sound. It could be a computer setup issue, but, I didn't have that problem with another USB DAC.

I give it a 5 star but there is a couple of things to consider. let me start off with the bad: The unit does get a little warm.It hasn't hindered anything or gotten to the point of burning anything. The stock usb cable isn't the highest quality. By default this unit isn't plug and play. You have to log onto Cetrance's website, enter your info and then they send you the drivers. Now the good. Goes up to 32/384 audio quality. This is above and beyond what anyone would need/want. Play with the audio quality to find what sounds best. Certain OS' and programs will only support certain qualities. The size. This thing is super small. The size of your thumb and not as thick. Can use it for cellphones or PC easily. Can absolutely POWER ANYTHING. Using with a pair of 250 ohm T90's and I have the amp @ 100% and windows's volume at 19%. If I were to go above 50% it would blow my ears out.

Absolute rubbish. I have now tried two of these - the first i sent RMA'd. Basically it didn't work on windows or osx. piece of junk - wish i had just got a normal dac rather than usb.

Excellent sound, small transportable format, wholeheartedly recommended if you are comfortable with Win 10 PC whereabouts. Its driver requires a lot of improvement, it feels uncomfortable with Skype, the device just looses driver altogether after some Win 10 updates, you would need to reinstall it, and there no feed back on their site. Otherwise - great transparency, great attack and dynamics. It is difficult to imagine that so much power and goodness could be packed in such a small device.

I needed a quick way to get up and running with my recently purchased Sennheiser HD800s headphones and connect with my PC. Its bigger brother was highly praised by a well known headphone connoisseur and reviewer. So I reasoned CEntrance must be a worthwhile brand as a whole and I found this product on their website. It has everything you could want in a very small form factor. It uses a passive cooling method which means that it is natural for the casing to get hot. To the touch the casing is cold when not used. This means its good at conducting heat. I have it tucked away under my desk on the floor. Set to high gain and max volume. To change the gain switch is easy. Simply slide the micro-USB connector against the gain switch. This is my first AMP/DAC and I hear there are other more expensive options that offer many times the quality. But as an entry-level product, you cannot go wrong with a DACport HD.

Centrance DACport HD is a very good product, perfectly balanced sound, no rough edges in the sound at all. I can only start hearing the noise floor when the volume is close to the max. I'm using both Google Play Music and Tidal with this product. If you will be web streaming using Chrome, this product won't work because the current version of Chrome does not support 384 kHz sample rate. You will need to upgrade your Chrome to version 49 which won't be released until March this year but there's a beta version available out there for download. The same issue exists in IE and Firefox. No issues at all if used with VLC and Tidal Windows app. Make sure you download the universal driver from Centrance's website.