iFi Audio

GO bar Portable DAC/Amp

£329

Ask me to recommend a high-quality, affordable modern DAC, and Southport-headquartered iFi Audio's name will come straight up. For the past few years, the company has seemed unable to put a foot wrong – whether you're looking at premium portable DAC/amps like the xDSD Gryphon, or the neat compactness of the latest second gen hip dac.

The reason for this impressive, almost faultless procession of tech is the attractive combination of keen pricing and feature-heavy offerings. Moreover, those features prove to be practical rather than merely spec-sheet garnish. Shaking up things recently is iFi's GO bar. Sitting next to its £199 GO Blu stablemate, the £329 asking price of the new kid is bound to raise an eyebrow or two. Not only does it put the GO bar above the hip dac price-wise, but it also puts it beyond highly-regarded dongle offerings from Astell&Kern, AudioQuest and Earmen, to mention just a few.

UP CLOSE

iFi's first ultra-compact portable USB-powered DAC/amp dongle appears to pack plenty into its slender 65x22x13mm and 29g stick form, and feels pretty sturdy thanks to its tactile aluminium body. It sports a USB-C input at one end, with iFi providing quality braided USB-C to USB-C and USB-C to Lightning cables, along with a USB-C to USB-A adapter. You will find 3.5mm unbalanced, and 4.4mm balanced headphone jack outputs at the other end.

Along one side of the Go bar's prismatic shape are four controls. The iEMatch slider toggles between 4.4mm, 3.5mm and off, and attenuates power to suit headphones depending on sensitivity. In the middle, the + and - buttons adjust volume, and if you press and hold them both together, you move between normal and turbo listening modes. The latter ups the gain by 6dB to satisfy more power-hungry headphones. Meanwhile, long-pressing the + button scrolls you through the digital filter options. Finally, the button nearest the USB end looks after the Xbass and Xspace audio presets.

On the larger flat side, nine tiny LED indicators light up to inform the user of file type, bit rate, volume level, and the level of Xbass/ Xspace activation. Unfortunately, this seems to be a test for your memory and/or eyesight, as iFi has chosen to label them in gloss black on the matte black metalwork. An excellent way of not cluttering the surface perhaps, but not exactly the most user-friendly solution for anyone interested in such information!

While the jury may be out on the lights and labels, iFi hasn't left the tech inside the GO bar open to debate. Under the hood, we are told there are high-quality capacitors from the likes of Panasonic and TDK and a 16-core XMOS processor that slurps up the digital audio via the USB-C input. Meanwhile, the Cirrus Logic DAC chipset can deliver native hi-res playback of PCM to 32-bit/384kHz, DSD to 13.2MHz, DXD to 384kHz, and features full MQA decoding.

Additionally, the GO bar continues iFi's preference for balanced analogue circuitry design alongside a symmetrical output stage. Fully separating the left and right channels mitigates noise and crosstalk in the signal path, and is a design usually found in larger, more expensive amplifiers. This results in a claimed 132dB signal-to-noise ratio on the balanced output, which drops to 108dB on the single-ended side – still higher than what standard CD-quality files are capable of. Frequency response is said to stretch from 20Hz to 45kHz (-3dB), at maximum resolution.

Power output is listed as 475mW (@32Ω) for balanced and 300mW (@32Ω) from the single-ended side. So, as well as sporting many more options than the hip dac 2, the GO bar pushes past the flask-shaped portable's 300mW balanced rating, which is also about standard for most DAC dongles. Again, its spec sheet claims 7.2 volts output (@600Ω) which is higher than the NEO iDSD and the xDSD Gryphon. Meanwhile, output impedance is quoted as 1Ω on both balanced and SE sides.

The iFi GO bar spent time plugged into my Google Pixel 6 Pro, my desktop PC, and Asus ZenBook Duo laptop, and had shorter workouts attached to an iPhone 13. Testing between these devices was made easier thanks to iFi providing Lightning to USB-C, plus a USB-C OTG cable and a USB-C to USB-A adapter with the GO bar as standard. At the other end of the unit, I attached a pair of Noble Savanna in-ear monitor phones, tricked out with ORB Clear Force Custom balanced cabling, plus a pair of Ultrasone Edition 15 Veritas closed-backed headphones going into the single-ended port.

Visually, this is an unassuming stick of tech to look at, unless you opt for the totally blinged-out 10th Anniversary Limited Edition GO bar, which sports a copper chassis wrapped in shiny gold plate. However, the work it does with digital audio from any device you care to slip into its USB-C port is quite a thing to hear…

THE LISTENING

Kicking things off with a 44.1kHz, 16-bit FLAC of the Melvins' sludgily glorious A History of Bad Men, and I detected a welcome whiff of warmth from the GO bar. Yet I was able to revel in the wonderfully textured low-range guitars that presented defined leading and trailing edges, rather than sounding woolly and indistinct as can sometimes happen. Similarly, the multi-layered vocals had an appreciable amount of separation, making this slab of alt-rock less daunting, even for first-time listeners.

Moving to a 24/96 version of Orange Crush by REM, and the GO bar slurped up all the colourful goodness. The middle-eight/guitar harmonic solo with samples, and Stipe's spoken word, underlined just how deep and wide a soundstage this dinky dongle could portray. I could mentally walk around the acoustic and focus on cowbells one moment, the whirring helicopter blades the next, or stand front and centre to take in the vocal monologue. Stipe's voice was nicely integrated into the overall performance but had enough space so as not to squash the dialogue. Meanwhile, the upper-mid frequencies of the percussion and guitars were nicely rendered – with enough bite for clarity without straying into the realms of shrillness.

I fed the GO bar with a scratchy early twenty-first century MP3 rip that had been compressed within an inch of its life, and there was little it could do to save it from sonic oblivion. Yet it's not a purely analytical actor in the chain, and chose not to shine a spotlight on all the glare and sibilance. Instead, it gave back pound for pound what had been invested – doing its best to make things bearable. On the other hand, with a really nice hi-res music file, it lets all the detail, dynamics and definition flood out.

As a result, I quickly got lost in a DSD64 rip of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk while sat at my desk. If not handled carefully, this track can soon become an incoherent muddle of ideas. However, via the Go bar, I knew we were in safe hands right from the gentle build at the intro. It was easy to hear the bass being slowly brought higher in the mix, the additional vocals and then the sneaky brass first introducing itself. All these layered elements gave the little unit a chance to show what it could do, and at no point did I ever get the impression that it was being stretched to its limits, either.

What I heard via the GO bar was a world apart from what I could ever expect from my unassisted Pixel Pro, laptop or even desktop machine. This unassuming alloy block worked away, excavating loads of musical detail and crunching code to present an impressively insightful and engaging listen without getting a lab coat on and machine-gunning the information down my headphones to prove how clever it was. Instead, the iFi GO bar is a quietly confident performer that simply wants you to enjoy every element hidden in your digital music library.

THE VERDICT

While iFi's GO bar might not shout its hi-res credentials, this little block of wonderment certainly seems to have it where it counts. While it might be pricier than some of its apparent competition, when you start lining up spec sheets this highly-portable slab of tech starts to leave a clear gap between it and the usual suspects. True, its status indicator lights aren't as clear as I would like, but this is not a deal-breaker for me. Meanwhile, its amazing audio quality, device agnosticism, and codec-crunching capabilities have had me renaming it the iFi GO wunderbar! In short, if you're looking for a super capable yet flexible portable headphone amp/DAC dongle, do give this a try.

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