Downmarket. Let's excuse the fact that owners of notoriously inefficient €6K headphones won't jack them into €699 media players. With FiiO's ultra-high gain, they easily could. Snobbism just won't let 'em. Somewhere, a retailer of costlier stuff is very happy. On Anna Maria Jopek's Upojenie with Pat Metheny—Intoxication in plain English—I sat at 85/120 on the volume like a pig in shyte. Whilst the total performance didn't match Hyperion's, the before/after Forza delta was as impressive. On relevance it was possibly first. That's because HifiMan's stock cable as coiled up in the next photo had FiiO's THX triple A 788+ chip amps feel demonstrably drier. It's as though its focus was purely on the transients and sustains to clip off the decays. Over Matt's cable, those fades resurfaced. With it their triggering of venue awareness maximized what this IC-based output could do. We might say that the R7's crisper drier more damped tuning needed the Forza's help more even if final results obviously couldn't match the far pricier earlier kit. Is a ~€1'250 cable likely to see itself on a €699 all-in-one? Not. Does it make a noticeable difference? Yes. Would I recommend you spend that money elsewhere first? Certainly. But this experiment wasn't about any likelihood of being copied. It was a pure data-gathering exercise with a clear upshot. Drier crisper op-amp based outputs groomed for low THD and so-called high res will definitely notice what the Forza cable does. Many could agree that here its significance was equal to what it did for my posh stuff. And I had more of the latter. Here that converts the FiiO to offline streamer whose 1TB SD card outputs USB into a Soundaware D300Ref bridge. That forwards S/PDIF to the COS D1 with remote-controlled analog volume atop the Cen.Grand Silver Fox amp processing converted now XLR signal for headphone consumption. A Silent Power/iFi supply powers the FiiO to bypass its internal SMPS.

Cen.Grand's biggest head amp is from the same gifted designer who, when turned down for an OEM license of Andreas Koch's DSD modules, rolled his own FPGA code. Like also Meitner and PS Audio, he's a DSD-first disciple. Hence his DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe in my downstairs system resamples all PCM to DSD1'024. If you're familiar with DSD's basic gestalt and how it parallels FoH, you won't be surprised that for my taste FoH's addition to this amp moved things just a wee too deep into earthy blackness. By going just halfway, Forza's dosage still played within my inner circle. That's neither here nor there but confirmed again that the LessLoss noise-filtering action of their C-MARC geometry is a seasoning agent. Once you know what it does, how it'll bed into various systems is very predictable. The only unknowable aspect is dosage. Will you call it just right; or where like and like meet, too much? On my turf, the FiiO called it essential, the Hyperion welcome, the Silver Fox still useful. How about the downstairs Soundaware P1x with its potent but darkish 12wpc discrete class A topology? How about Kinki's THR-1 with my favourite Exicon lateral Mosfets?

With the P1x I felt just a bit like a truffle-hunting porker rooting around the kind of moist loam also in heavy nursery bags of specialized black potting soil. I usually don't go for that level of saturation and density. For my tastes, here the Forza's contribution was unnecessary. On the more aerated light-infused THR-1 however, it was happy days all week long. The Forza downplayed Susvara's electrostatic aspect and bolted on more dynamic chunky attributes to end up right in what my subjective sense called the middle. The Kinki and Enleum amps were my biggest Forza fans. Which now segues to my conclusion.