Listening
With a device that has a reputation (and pricetag!) like this one, you can a very real sense of anticipation and trepidation leading up to the moment you press ‘play’. Being both $4,995 USD in price and being pitched as the ‘ultimate all-in-one device, I was worried whether the Precision DAC live up to my expectations – and being a reviewer, they were rightly high. Starting with a diet of Qobuz files played from my Mac via Roon, any concerns were very quickly abated. The Precision DAC has a markedly lifelike, punchy sound that for lack of a better description feels entirely ‘analogue’. The thing that pulls you in early is its sense of immersion and engagement. The Precision DAC casts a deep, enveloping soundstage with precisely layered tracks that excel in both depth and width. Tonally, it’s a case of living up to the name that’s printed on the front of the device – it’s indeed ‘Precise’, but at the same time it’s not a stark, clinical kind of precise. Rather, the Precision DAC has just enough hint of sweetness to its tone so as to make your music feel fun and organic, while digging deep into the details of a track so as to give you incredible insight into tunes you’ve listened to thousands of times before, all done so in an intoxicating way.
The family DNA that I first sampled with the Fidelice Precision Headphone Amplifier is readily apparent when stepping up to the Precision DAC. The same organic, lifelike tone is on display here, yet the Precision DAC has a more ‘effortless’ feeling to it – everything feels like it’s been taken up a gear compared to its stablemate, displaying more space, more depth, and more apparent detail.
The Precision DAC needs only a brief twist of the volume knob in low gain (about 8:30) to get the Sennheiser HD800s as loud as you’ll ever need. I started playing Tame Impala’s ‘The Slow Rush’, and I genuinely had to do a double-take to check that I hadn’t left my speakers playing by accident – the sense of space and location of different sounds within the mix was truly ‘out of head’.
The Precision DAC is able to render an utterly lifelike articulation of notes at any part of the frequency range. Paul’s bass notes in ‘Golden Slumbers’ can be revealing of poor bass handling, but the Precision DAC has an absolutely perfect sense of both attack, tone, and lifelike decay. John Coltrane’s tenor sax sounds 5 metres away from you in an intimate jazz club in ‘Lush Life’, it’s that lifelike and organic sounding. The complex, busy passages of Atoms for Peace’s ‘Stuck Together Pieces’ are expertly pulled apart and stuck back together in a superbly coherent and articulate way – the Precision DAC deals with the minutiae in an expert manner, all the while managing to make it lush and utterly addictive.
The headphone stage on the Precision DAC is certainly no slouch – it may have ‘only’ 1 x Watt available at 16 ohms, but needs less than a quarter twist in low gain to unleash the best that the Aeon 2 Noire has to offer. The all-black planars from Dan Clark Audio are a fantastic match for the detail and nuance of the Precision DAC, which was able to superbly wrangle their somewhat insensitive drivers. The Aeon 2 Noire has some of the best imaging and immersion of any closed-back cans I’ve experienced, and Thom Yorke’s ‘Dawn Chorus’ via the Precision DAC simply made me close my eyes and drift off into an otherworldly sea of serene electronica.
I mentioned earlier that Rupert Neve Designs has equipped the Precision Dac with no less than seven user-selectable filtering options for the AK 4497 DAC chip, via a somewhat cumbersome series of five small toggles that need to be arrayed according to the diagram in the user manual. I’ve always found that DAC filters options to make an extremely subtle change to the sound of a device (at most), and it’s very much the case with this DAC too. Trying to change between filters quickly to determine any apparently changes is practically impossible and I’d be strained to try and report any perceived differences between filters. Needless to say, they all sound ‘good’ (sorry, I know that’s not helpful), but I was content to remain on the ‘default’ option that Rupert Neve Designs intended for the device, and that’s the one that I’ve listened with 99% of my time with the Precision DAC.
The analogue inputs on the Precision DAC allowed me to give the headphone amplifier a whirl using a different flavour of DAC upstream, so I spent some time listening via the Schiit Bifrost 2 feeding the Fidelice as a source device. The addition of the Schiit Multibit DAC didn’t present overly apparent changes at first, but some closer listening and switching between the on-board and upstream DACs (which were grouped together in Roon) revealed the Bifrost 2 to have a more rounded, smoothed character and tonally felt a degree ‘wetter’. Individual notes were less pinpoint placed on the Schiit DAC, whereas they were more immediately ‘visible’ when using the Precision DAC’s inbuilt digital decoder. Overall it was a more immersive and detailed listen when listening to the digital + analogue sections of the Precision DAC combined, but the overall tonal weight felt a degree leaner. This suited darker-sounding headphones like the Sennheiser HD650, but the Bifrost 2 added a degree of euphony and relaxation to the HD800s that was better suited for longer listening sessions.
The Precision DAC certainly impresses for both digital and analogue duties, and paired exceptionally well with every full-sized headphone that I threw at it. It’s a lot of money for a device that is at once both well-featured, and someone utilitarian. I say ‘utilitarian’ because the first comparison that I immediately drew up was with the Naim Uniti Atom Headphone Edition, which was the Headfonia Product of the Year for 2021. The Uniti Atom is both more affordable (but still a rather expensive $3,299!) and far more ‘future-ready’ than the Fidelice. Whereas the Rupert Neve is a retro-inspired, streamlined device where signals come in and signals come out, the Naim takes things firmly into the 21st Century and adds a remote, a full-colour display, an app, as well as fully realised streaming and wireless capabilities. The Fidelice is without question a more ‘purist’ audiophile device, with a full suite of balanced inputs and outputs and a more neutrally-leaning tonal character, whereas on the other hand, the Uniti Atom makes a case for itself thanks to its incredibly well-implemented digital user experience and a more euphonic tonal character. Listeners who are happy to play with a ‘legacy’-style traditional setup may favour the more analogue character of the Rupert Neve, but if streaming and wireless are your jam, then the Naim may be better suited. Ultimately I think it may come down to aesthetics and your musical ‘philosophy’ more than anything
Final thoughts
The Fidelice Precision DAC is unlike anything I’ve reviewed before. Firstly, it’s such a unique design statement in terms of melting together old-world analogue know-how with a modern twist – it’s a bold middle ground, but I think it just works. I simply had to have the Precision DAC front and centre on my desk while listening to it, even though it’s a big beast of a device and it doesn’t leave much room around it. It just oozes ‘cool’, and it’s a pleasure to interact with on a human level.
On the other hand, it’s functionally a fairly simple device and leaves a few things off the table when it comes to acting as the brains of your hifi/listening set-up – the remote being the one thing that would take it from ‘great’ to ‘awesome’. Sonically, the Precision DAC is all class – it’s lifelike, engaging, and immersing, and simply makes you want to listen to album after album. The headphone stage is excellent, and it’s also a terrific preamplifier.
The Fidelice Precision DAC also happens to be the most expensive piece of equipment I’ve reviewed to date – $4,995 is a lot of money for what on paper seems rather modest: a 1 x Watt headphone amplifier with an onboard AK 4497 DAC plus preamplifier facilities.
There’s no getting around the fact that with the Fidelice Precision DAC that you’re paying for more than simply the sum of its parts: you’re buying into its legendary heritage, that fabled analogue circuitry, and a piece of statement design that you simply have to look at to ‘get it’. If money were no object, this would be The One Box that I’d want to have on my desk. Sure, you can get better specced and (arguably) higher-performing separate devices for far, far less money, but I’ve just realised that I’m in the final paragraph of my review of the Fidelice DAC, and then means that I need to put it back in the box and send it back to the manufacturer next week. And that makes me very sad indeed.
