From Taiwan to California and back. My first track soared on the impassioned vocals of the best contemporary Flamenco singers taking turns on Vicente Amigo's "Requiem" from the Memoria de los sentidos album. Whilst the COS Engineering H1 is fully balanced with twin XLR3 outputs for which I have the right cabling, I conducted this Susvara  A/B in single-ended mode, USB direct. Like their big standalone DAC/preamp D1, the half-size COS mate is silvery, airy, quick and highly resolved. Here that emphasized more upper harmonics in the occasionally hoarse pushed voices, more on-string metal than coupled tone wood for the guitar. As you expect, this balance lit up space a bit more than íntimo to present particularly the high vocals more forward and energetic.

The basic tenor of this distinction in fact began with the opening bells, their harmonic weighting and decay trails. Wyred's machine set the tonal balance center lower. It built the overall greater gravitas or lower anchor, slightly damped reverb, made tone feel more earthy than airy and rose a bit higher on dynamic peaks. With €2'500 going to Taiwan for a buy, íntimo's bill for equal but different performance at 1000 fewer notes hit hard. For that it abolishes AES/EBU and those balanced outputs but adds one each coax and Toslink; plus all those practical software adjustments which the COS doesn't know about.

On truly superior recordings, I'd peg the costlier Taiwanese as the more resolved and insightful. On the majority of lesser productions, I'd also call it a bit more critical for the same reason. Hence íntimo is the one you'd now prefer to go the distance with. User control over amplification factor next meant that íntimo not only played utterly noise free on our full-size headphone of highest sensitivity, the shiny heavyweight Final Sonorous X. It also allowed me to take them to 10:00 or 11:00 in lo-gain mode. Being a smooth control, there were no steps but the point is, you won't get too loud too quickly even with such keen loads. You can traverse many fine degrees of output strength to suit your mood and material. And to counter the built-in voicing or emphasize it further, there are the tone control options which I didn't engage to keep confusion at bay.

If you correlate class A transistor sound with Pass Labs, our ownership of their smallest stereo amp would concur. íntimo fits the bill of associated expectations well. It's a beefy sound with a strong power region, fleshy midrange and slightly soft top that majors on dynamic drive and rich tone to lean slightly into the warm and fulsome. A strategic massage with the on-board tone controls will shift this balance but in bypass, it's where you'll start. How about DACing in a speaker system? I asked EJ what volume control setting equates to the standard 2V on the line outs; and how the volume control is implemented in the first place. "The volume control is a resistor ladder IC. We use the outer knob to control a pot that is encoded to program the correct volume level. This prevents the audio signal from passing through the volume pot so we can be sure that levels are matched and properly track. In medium gain mode, all the way up on the pot is 2V on the pre-out. High gain maxes out at above 4V so 3:15 gets you 2V. Low gain is about 1V fully open."

As fixed-gain DAC with bypassed attenuator, íntimo slipped seamlessly into our main rig. There it replaced a Soundaware D300Ref and Denafrips Terminator combo, meaning a USB reclocker plus DAC. Naturally, it couldn't equal what it replaced. The primary differences were a higher noise floor for more subcutaneous grit and grain; and an energetic damper on the prior gushing fluidity.

iMac ⇒ Audirvana 3 resampling to 352.8kHz ⇒ USB ⇒ íntimo ⇒ Vinnie Rossi L2 with WE 300B ⇒ LinnenberG Liszt ⇒ Audio Physic Codex.

More salient for our purposes, there was no real loss of resolution, no change in tonal balance, no soundstage shrinkage, no reduction in sorting precision. Already at this stage of a hifi journey, dealing with a quality DAC of 2019 vintage from a renowned high-value expert, one gets all that. What lies beyond is far more subtle. How much of that subtlety will matter to seem meaningful… that depends squarely on exposure, on paying close listening attention, on a system that's optimized front to back and on the ability plus willingness to sort all of that out, then fund it. Having ascertained that íntimo worked just fine downstairs but was slightly out of place, it made far more sense to surround it with price-appropriate ancillaries and eliminate a preamp altogether. Isn't that's how actual buyers would use it? So upstairs it went where surrounding hardware became a Soundaware A280 SD card transport from China, Stello S100 MkII amp from Korea and compact sound|kaos Vox 3 monitors from Switzerland.