Small lives tall. After unpacking classily branded materials with extra internal corner protectors, foam liners sleeving the inner box with its own precision-cut thick foam cradle, a draw-string bag around the DAC, goodies like a gray chamois cloth and metallic cc-styled warranty card, the Laiv DAC topped my desk dom style. On its pointy footers it fit just so.
I²S over HDMI off a Singxer SU-2 USB bridge worked right off. OS mode now hit 705.6kHz for 44.1kHz files. With the Enleum's twin RCA inputs, both iFi and Laiv converters connected live off the same bridge. A simple click on the amp's input selector toggled them. iFi's own analog attenuator trimmed its higher output voltage to match.
I was in biz lickety-split. DACs really needn't be complicated; though being handsome is a very lovely bonus. With proof of life bagged in no time, some break-in would be next.
Just so, it'd be declassé not to shed a few extra words on fit'n'finish. This deck and its remote are very sharp dressers. The photos knew so all along. Getting hands on with the machined metal simply added layers.
And it can't be coincidence that even without spike shoes, the remote slips out of sight right beneath. If you leave its sloped end stick out, you'll even see the brand name whose top engraving my computer shelf obscured.
Standards. Those on human beauty span the gamut. People feeling beholden to conform can suffer greatly. With inanimate machinery there's no psychological stress to go against our own genetics. We just pick what we like. I see few prospective punters vote against the Harmony DAC's cosmetics. They're classy, intuitively functional and in display black-out mode very simple.
They just artfully, um – shaved off a corner. Rakish. Without frontal silk screen but instead deep engravings of the universal power/menu logos, minimalism tends to age better. Fashions come and go. My iFi's fascia is far busier, its fish-eye display far tinier. Busted.
I think if they bothered to submit samples, Laiv would stand as good a chance to win a Red Dot design award as Enleum have multiple times already. Standards. They've certainly come up from the dinosaur age of utilitarian black boxes and bad-smelling underground man caves.
Of triangles and squares. The display's top line shows a triangle at the far left. Below it the remote's slider is set to triangle not square. Voilà, productive pairing. Offspring to follow.
Despite advertised DSD256 support, in OS mode Harmony didn't upsample native DSD128 nor DSD64. This mention is extremist pea counting just to cover all bases. I could certainly play my few native 11'289kbps dsf files without protest. DSD-über-alles fans could theoretically offboard PCM⇒DSD resampling in their favourite software player and Harmony would dutifully digest it though multi-bit DACs can't natively process 1-bit DSD without prior conversion to some form of PCM. Unlike Holo, Laiv don't bundle a separate 1-bit converter with their R2R machine. DSD playback here is more of a convenience feature like non-balanced XLR sockets. You can play DSD, it just won't render as DSD. "1-bit signal from DSD will reconstruct to multi-bit PCM before passing to the R2R ladders. All DSD will resample to either 705.6kHz or 768kHz depending on the DSD multiplier." In my hi-res rig Harmony parlayed subtle shifts between Audirvana Studio's R8brain and SoX upsamplers; whether those handled 4 x presampling to 176.4/192kHz or not; whether native Qobuz routed through Wasapi, Wasapi exclusive mode or DirectSound; and other such silly-serious shenanigans. Diddling such digital-domain deeds to hear them make more, less or no difference is, I think, a direct testament to a converter's innate magnification powers aka resolution. Obviously downstream kit must track it. Suffice to say that in my first date the Laiv cleared all minor hurdles I put in its path. Clean bill of health checked off. Live long and prosper?
USB input, oversampling engaged, + phase, native DSD128 playback.
To take those temps, the resident iFi sat in my usual/favourite mode: tubes bypassed, Gibbs transient-optimized filter engaged, upsampling to 705.6/768kHz like the Harmony. Audirvana's SoX algo did the heavy lifting of 44.1/48kHz to 176.4/192kHz. Set to pure hog mode to freeze out Win 10/64's own sound engine, this was my purest path for cloud files. The Singxer SU-2 bridge with an iFi USB3 cable and inline noise filter isolated my HP Z2's work station from the two DACs. As might be expected from holding sweaty hands on coinage—the more multi-talented iFi with extra headfi/preamp utilities cost €3'249 when I bought it and includes an outboard PSU—this was more of a lateral game than rungs up or down the sonic ladder. The most obvious offset was the Sino/Brit's clearly emphasized lower-mid/upper-bass register. It had the twin effect of feeling more locomotive and thick. The iFi presented as the rosy-cheeked milk maid well acquainted with daily hard physical graft on the farm. The Laiv played the thrice-a-week yoga and spin-class gal. One was chunkier and more ruddy if less articulated and defined, the other quicker, lither and fit in more toned fashion.
Planned offspring in outer quadrants; Net² streamer, HP²A headfi/preamp, GaNM monos, LExt upgrade power supply for HP²A.
In audiophile-approved terms, the Laiv's handling of Manouche guitar runs, Jazz fiddle arpeggios and fat vibratos put more overtone glitter on transients. It gave strings more upper-harmonic blueness and zing which the iFi rendered less peeled out and more gilded. Though I recognized the effect as related to even/odd-order harmonics so 2nd/4th vs 3rd/5th, I couldn't help but hear the Laiv as the more resolved, separated and energized. In terms of subjective timing, it felt more on the front foot where the iFi relaxed back a bit. The iFi's amplitude response felt more voiced for deliberate richness, its THD set for triode timbre. The Laiv's frequency response felt more linear, its THD parked in pentode. Readers familiar with my tastes already know which I preferred. Stepping farther back than personal bias, I shall still call this juxtaposition a sideways exercise on sound. It only was an undeniable up/down gig on utilities where iFi flattened Laiv like a hammered flounder. But as iFi's ongoing digital flagship from when Thorsten Loesch was still on their team, Harmony's sonic showing was really strong. I'll get more specific against a Denafrips Terminator Plus and Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe. For now partake of the Transatlantic Guitar Trio with monster virtuosos Joscho Stephan, Richard Smith and Rory Hoffmann. It's a masterclass on Harmony's tonal and textural virtues; of highlighting three different instruments with three unique timbres whilst jamming tautly in the pocket.
A personal guilty pleasure are Wael Jassar's thirty Arabian miniatures from his 2019 Collection on Sharqi Production. His sound engineer had a pugilist's heavy hands on the reverb controls. It creates a deliberately foggy milieu for its clarinet, cello, oud, qanun and piano accompaniment. Those sounds drift in and out of from between wafting sheets of atmospherics. The solo vocals too radiate multiple rings of Saturn as staggered reverb waves. In too richly padded or congealing an electronics chain, this quickly becomes annoyingly blurry. I was thus fascinated by how Harmony's fetching tonality didn't steal from its separation powers. It made clear sense of the delay ghosts laying on thick connective tissue between the main images. Now this moody music felt appropriately impressionistic, its treatment of artificed recorded space an asset or enabler not misjudged FX. This is about balancing between resolution as a surgeon's scalpel separating down to the bone; and tone body as a nearly physical substance that casts shadows to not be transparent at all. Absent of tonality as a function of linear or contoured frequency response, this second balance is a key variable between components and their interactions. Does small-detail resolution serve compositional intelligibility and musical interplay at the expense of image density which has playback feel material rather than ghostly? I thought Harmony's midpoint between the lucidity of resolution and thickness of embodiment very well judged indeed. It piled on equally on each scale.
