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Five Stars - What Hi-Fi? Magazine
Applause Award - stereonet.com
Best of 2023 Award - ecoustics.com
Platinum Award - Thumb Culture
The Headphone Dongle That Links You with Your Music
The GO link from iFi Audio is the missing link in your listening experience.
The GO link enables corded headphones and earphones to connect to digital devices that don’t have a 3.5mm headphone output. But that's not all. Even if your device does have a headphone 3.5mm jack, the GO link delivers a big sonic upgrade, because its sophisticated DAC and headphone amp circuitry are superior to the audio tech contained within smart devices and computers.
Award-Winning Performance
The GO link won a top rating of Five Stars from the July 4m 2023 issue of England's Five Stars - What Hi-Fi? Mmagazine "The iFi Go link is like a featherweight UFC fighter – beneath that slender exterior lies an impressive machine just waiting to be unleashed."
It also picked up an Applause Award from Jay Garrett in his May 10, 2023 review for stereonet.com. "To my ears then, this is the best pocketable DAC/amp solution at its price. It performs well, is flexible enough not to be annoying in your pocket, comes from a trusted brand and allows your wired headphones to see daylight once again. What's not to love about that?"
Even More Awards!
"Across the board, the GO link was free of coloration with every IEM and headphone that we tried; detail retrieval and overall clarity is excellent at its price point," reports Will Jennings at ecoustics.com, which honored the GO link with a Best of 2023 Award.
"This tiny dongle elevates the sound quality of the iPhone and Android-powered smartphones by a considerable margin and at a price that has to be considered a huge bargain."
Thumb Culture handed the GO link a Platinum Award, noting, "For a no-nonsense and cost-effective solution, the iFi GO link DAC is a great buy. Especially if you want to enjoy audio as you were meant to hear it. While there are other more expensive DACS on the market, iFi has produced an affordable enhancement that brings with it versatility and quality."
Flexible Design – Literally Flexible
The Go link's flexible design isn't just limited to what it does. It also includes how it does what it does from a convenience and practicality standpoint.
At one end of the GO link is a USB-C connector, and at the other is the DAC and headphone amp circuitry, both housed in robust yet lightweight magnesium alloy enclosures. In between is a 2.8" length of flexible cable. This allows the DAC/amp section to be angled towards the listener while reducing stress on the USB port to which the GO link is connected.
The cable linking both sections together uses silver-plated copper conductors with individual polymer insulation in a ‘twisted pair’ configuration. This rotational twist helps to optimize inductance and capacitance and also aids noise rejection. That means the GO link’s sound isn’t affected by electromagnetic interference picked up from nearby electrical sources.
High-Performance ESS Sabre DAC Chip
At the heart of the GO link lies a power-efficient, high-performance DAC chip from ESS Technology’s Sabre HiFi series – the ES9219MQ/Q – benefiting from 32-bit HyperStream III architecture. That's huge in a product as affordable as the Go link.
This combines with Quad DAC+ and Time Domain Jitter Eliminator technologies, plus iFi's dedicated clock circuitry, which utilizes a specialized crystal oscillator to deliver ultra-low distortion, excellent clarity and impressive dynamic range.
Due to this DAC chip’s advanced specification, rarely implemented high-end features such as adjustable analog gain with DRE (Dynamic Range Enhancement) plus technologies to minimize THD (Total Harmonic Distortion) and crosstalk are on board.
The GO link’s hi-res audio credentials are highly impressive given its diminutive size and price tag. It delivers PCM to 32-bit / 384kHz, DSD to 11.2MHz (DSD256), and MQA. To help you keep track of what's going on, an LED changes color to indicate the incoming audio format – PCM, DSD or MQA – and the PCM/DSD sample rate.
"Smooth as Butter"
"Smooth as butter, with enough power to drive full-size headphones or IEMs!" raves Gregory Nisbet, head-fi.org, April 6, 2024. "This product is worth every cent as far as my viewpoint goes, it is well built, well designed and well accessorized for what it is. And truly I don’t see how anyone could end-up disappointed in any way from this purchase!"
"I’ve been using the GO link on my walk to work for a while now in place of my usual DAP, and I’ve yet to find anything negative to say about it," observes Oscar Stewart, hifipig.com, April 26, 2023. "I will be honest, when using the GO link I haven’t actually missed using my DAP as the sound quality is simply sublime out of such a small little dongle that I could quite happily live with this for portable audio duties."
"If you’re a student itching to start your hi-fi journey, I’d strongly recommend considering a portable DAC," notes Alistair Stevenson, What Hi-Fi? magazine, August 21, 2024. "Forget AirPods, this is the hi-fi accessory every student should be taking to university."
Hardware-Based Volume Control
Unlike other headphone dongles, the GO link doesn’t rely on the software-based volume controls in connected digital devices. This can adversely affect audio resolution.
Instead, adjusting the volume on the connected device controls the volume level in the GO link’s DAC, not in the phone, tablet or computer. This hardware-based volume control is another feature that helps to deliver the GO link’s superior sonic performance.
Suddenly You're in Headphone Heaven
The GO link’s headphone amp feeds a gold-plated 3.5mm jack, incorporating our S-Balanced configuration to reduce noise and crosstalk.
It delivers a power output of 70mW into 32 ohms, and a voltage output of 2.05V into 600 ohms. This gives it plenty of oomph to drive the kind of headphones and earphones likely to be used with the GO link and easily outclasses the headphone outputs built into smart devices and computers.
Dynamic Range Enhancement
In music production, dynamic range means the difference between the loudest and quietest sounds. It’s measured in decibels, or dB for short. In a single audio track, dynamic range means the dB difference between the loudest and quietest moment in the audio file.
You can think of the dynamic range in a system as the space between the noise floor and the clipping point. When a sound goes below the noise floor you won’t be able to tell the difference between the signal and the system noise of the medium. When a sound goes above the clipping point, the tops of its waveform will get abruptly cut off, causing harshness and distortion.
iFi’s proprietary technology extends the Dynamic Range by 6 dB or more, for an improved listening experience.
