Srajan
KrautFi? It’s hifi from Germany. Yet nobody calls it that. So why ChiFi? More than a decade ago that audio slang stood for cheap‘n’cheerful kit from the Middle Kingdom routinely based on tubes. The slightly derogatory – if then perhaps not entirely unfounded – connotation was unproven reliability; possibly dubious provenance; lack of originality even outright cloning; and a shadowy existence well off the West’s well-lit mainstream. Then the wheel of audio dharma turned. It always does. Even industry legend Mark Levinson embraced Chinese electronics under his short-lived Red Rose Music brand. Today Cayin, Denafrips, FiiO, Holo, Jay’s, Kinki, Melody and Shanling all enjoy dealer distribution in the EU and US, Stereophile ratings and a solid rep for ‘arrived’ performance. For three of these brands, Singapore’s Vinshine Audio under the stewardship of Alvin Chee became the global sales platform. That pioneered how to successfully sell select Chinese products direct to the West. Since then his web portal has spun off the Beatechnik site, also in Singapore. It’s where Jay’s Audio and their subsidiary LHY moved to gain their own dedicated personnel. Alvin’s Denafrips account became too busy to support three very popular Sino brands.
Earlier this year former Alvin lieutenant Weng Fai Hoh launched his own brand Laiv Audio. It’s pronounced ‘live’ to imply a sonic tuning modelled on concert excitement. With his own 9-deep engineering team, Weng’s product is no OEM fare from one of Vinshine’s brands like Musician Audio. His team came to him from Aiwa, Emotiva, Harman/Kardon, JVC, Onkyo, Panasonic, Philips, Sansui, Sony, Tascam/Teac and Yamaha. His industrial designer Dean Zhong was involved with the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games’ torch, German WMF, German Zwilling, Nike, Air France and five-star hotel chains Hilton and Sheraton. Whilst the brand is new, its brain trust is solid and packs 50+ man years’ worth of experience. As we’ll find out, that shows from Jump Street. With Weng’s apprenticeship under Alvin, his business model too doesn’t follow Aune, Gustard, Musician, Singxer, smsl & Topping which trade through Ali Baba, Amazon and Aoshida. For the moment he sells Singapore direct whilst looking for a few select resellers in the EU and US. He’s also prepping fulfilment centres in those markets to warehouse inventories for quick dispatch.
Laiv’s published road map already includes a pre/headamp, external power supply, screen-enabled server and GaNFet monos. First up is the Harmony DAC which previews a half-width chassis one rack space tall. It’s styled to the T’ai Chi. There’s an informative 3.8” diagonal grey-scale display of 320 x 132px. In Darko Speak we spy audiophile catnip galore: discrete R2R; NOS mode; pin-configurable I²S over HDMI; balanced drive; DSD256 and 768 PCM support. Meow! To be fashionable there are black and silver finishes with gold accents and gorgeous matching remotes. Those even rock assignable buttons for the two most commonly used commands that would otherwise be accessed a few menu layers down. As a classic albeit non-chip multi-bit converter, incoming DSD first converts to PCM. I²S configures in the menu from eight modes whose wiring conventions the manual and display detail. This adjustment can be made on the fly and by remote whilst music plays. Of course, there’s also USB, coax (not BNC) and Toslink. AES/EBU is MIA for likely space reasons. Analog outputs are on RCA and XLR. Two ground posts and the usual power inlet complete the pert business end.
Similar to a legacy Mac Mini or current Enleum AMP-23R, Harmony’s footprint is 25.5 x 25cm WxD. Total height when sat on three conical footers – with included protector discs – is 7.5cm; 5cm without them. The controller wheel that’s styled like Bakoon’s original AMP-11R or Lindemann’s music:book range performs manual input selection or menu navigation via rotate/push. The remote duplicates both functions. The display is either on or off. There’s standby mode on the faceted edge whilst the power switch sits next to the rear IEC socket. Output voltage is a standard 2/4Vrms on RCA/XLR respectively. Further features are non-oversampling or upsampling mode; polarity inversion; and local or I²S clock. An open belly switch sets 115/230V. Branding is by deep Laiv engraving on the top cover. For all the purr of Harmony, two things are hairball. One: this is a fixed output DAC. Sorry, no volume control. We must follow up with a preamp, integrated or active speaker with variable gain. Two: there’s no headfi to steal no thunder from the coming dedicated deck. Unlike my Cen.Grand DSDAC 1.0 Deluxe’s low-contrast display with insufficiently large font; unlike my Denafrips Terminator Plus’ absence of a display altogether – that of the Laiv has key intel perfectly legible from the seat. By showing incoming and outgoing sample rates in OS mode, we’re alerted whenever intermediary routing hardware resamples 41.1kHz to (for example) 48kHz without our knowledge. Factory warranty is 24 months. Price including shipping but ex VAT is $2’700. My resident converters which add Sonnet’s Pasithea and COS Engineering’s D1 hover around the €5-6K mark. The Taiwanese outlier demands €9K. Even the iFi iDSD Pro Signature on my desktop is more than the Harmony – though by far less.
The point of these otherwise reprehensible namedrops is context creation. John and I are content creators. But we also insist on being context creators with classic side-by-side comparisons. Those must be in situ when audiophile memory is more fickle than Lady Fortune. Against the lay of my digital land, your ears might now go elf when I tell you that my silver Laiv loaner turned paid-for resident to bounce Cen.Grand’s flagship from main to upstairs rig. How many DACs does one mad guy need? I can listen to only one; at a time. I’ve just not gotten around to selling off what’s been overshadowed. Plus, having popular alternatives is what enables side-by-side comparisons in the first place. Unlike speakers and classic muscle amps, DACs store just a bit easier. At least that’s my excuse whilst I run (cough) four systems and my wife another two.
I bought the Harmony because it performs on par with my two best converters of Cen.Grand and Sonnet then adds a distinctive sonic alternative which beds-in ideally with my main system. Given my 22+ years on this beat and the price range of my digital harem, I find it very rare to still chance upon different enough when more coin just isn’t on. Speaker changes peg my needle far more. Even amplifiers can. DACs? Not anywhere near by the same margin. Despite charging the least of my binary bunch, the Laiv managed ‘different enough’ to stick around. Now you ask what its difference is. For that, we revisit Darko podcast #52 and its segment on THD. Sorry, repetitiveness is unavoidable when readers have different comprehension levels of audiophile lingo [and don’t catch everything we throw out there – Ed]. To recap, total harmonic distortion adds itself to the recorded signal as an unavoidable artefact of playback circuitry or transducers. Even-order harmonics occur at musically attractive intervals of mainly octaves and fifths. Odd-order harmonics begin benign but with the 7th and beyond, add progressively ‘bluer’ more dissonant intervals. You needn’t play the piano to appreciate that if you depress three adjacent white keys and the two black ones between all at once, you’re not creating a pristine C major chord. You’re punching a cluster of sharply rubbing dissonance. That’s exactly what happens with odd-order harmonics beyond the 5th. Even certain higher even-order harmonics ‘fall off the wagon’ though most remain at benign intervals.
The key THD lesson is that higher doses of 2nd + 4th or 3rd + light 5th remain tonally persuasive whilst even minimal amounts of 7th and higher odd-order products become ever more objectionable. That’s further aggravated when music grows more complex and chromatic. A no-feedback SET can throw out “pathetic” 5%-10% THD figures yet remain pleasing because its THD limits itself to euphonic 2nd-harmonic octave doubling. A solid-state amp of 0.05% THD could hide seemingly minuscule amounts of 7th to 19th harmonics. Those can bite at even homoeopathic strength. They are ever more black keys added to a piano’s C-major chord. Pass Labs and subsidiary brand FirstWatt build amplifiers with strategically simple distortion profiles. Those conform to either 2nd-harmonic or 3rd-harmonic dominant profiles. Their sales figures reportedly split quite evenly down the middle. For my-way-or-the-highway types, the takeaway is sobering. The same number of buyers prefer the 2nd harmonic (single-ended or triode) as the other half fancies the 3rd harmonic (push-pull or pentode). This popularity split is down to avoiding higher-order harmonics which at even minimal doses inject a metallic or bluish tinge that drops temps from warm to cool to outright frosty. That undertone registers as irritating hence exhausting. It’s the antithesis of organic.
Popular descriptions for our 2nd/3rd flavours are cappuccino vs espresso, vanilla ice cream vs lemon sorbet. The associated attributes are thick, dense, mellow, creamy and relaxed vs lean, lucid, quick, resolute, separated and charged. Dosage is king. Owners of valve amps with adjustable negative feedback may find that zero feedback is too much cow in the java whilst max feedback eats into dimensionality and colour. They often end up with just a click or two of NFB, say 2dB or 4dB. It trims the THD fat but maintains enough sweetness to feel just right. Randall Smith, my old boss at Mesa Boogie, used to joke that the adjustable feedback controls on his Mesa Baron and Tigris amplifiers should really say listen for no feedback, measure for max feedback. All this is personal taste and ancillary interaction. Now we’re ready for Harmony’s flavour pitch. My iFi and Cen.Grand–the former with two optional tube paths, the latter resampling all PCM to DSD 512/1’024 which the iFi can also do–are members of the 2nd-harmonic club. So is the Denafrips. It and the iFi behave as though their dosage is higher. That gives the Cen.Grand a resolution edge where its mates are cuddlier or rosier. The Sonnet seems most neutral and resolved. It’s also leaner or more matter of fact. It’s just not dry or mechanical or I’d not have it. The Laiv Harmony introduces the 3rd harmonic like the FirstWatt F5 did. That tuning’s pure fifth 1½ octaves above the fundamental gives tunes a more percussive nearfield pep, their treble more tintinnabulation. That word Nelson Pass introduced me to which I had to look up so you can too. The 3rd harmonic of the Harmony tuning creates crisper separation, more specific depth layering and detail magnification, the latter second only to the ultra-low distortion Dutch. Yet the Harmony’s tonal substance is clearly earthier and more robust like premium strong black coffee can be without any sweetener. That’s where in my estimation the Laiv overshadows my Pasithea. It promotes a more nearfield ‘live’ feeling of energized excitement so the brand name seems well chosen. It’s why the Harmony DAC has usurped the hot shelf in my rack. I call it my little Bluesy Tonmeister. That’s obviously back at KrautFi meaning tone master. Hey, Darko.Audio’s HQ is Berlin.
In conclusion, let’s call Laiv’s Harmony DAC what happened to ChiFi 10+ years after the term first surfaced then slowly faded as evidence to the contrary established to cut off prior connotations with LowFi. In our Darko podcast #53, John asked whether I thought it fair to call the Harmony DAC this year’s Denafrips find. I do think that’s fair to say if Laiv manages to follow up with brand promotion in both media and global show circuits full-on Vinshine Audio Terminator style. In this overcrowded segment, ‘build it and they’ll come’ is a rarity. Build it and promote the hell out of it seems more realistic. Only time will tell that story. Likewise, for whether Weng Fai Hoh can duplicate Alvin Chee’s X factor. He certainly had the right mentor. But it says nothing yet about timing over which man has no control. The pandemic threw a global curveball. Nobody knows what’s next. As I wrote this on April 24th, I was still very enthusiastic about new brand Laiv Audio and their maiden product. It’s exceptionally well built, handsome in a minorly flashy way, thoughtfully featured, competitive up to thrice its ask, laden with audiophile catnip and the currently most affordable entry in my collection of D/A converters. Best of all, its sonics pursue the path less travelled, there at the fork in the woods where most veer down the 2nd harmonic…
Further information: LAiV
