well-recorded, contemporary pop music often sounds excellent because it’s generally mixed and mastered extremely well. Consistently to this, GO Bar drives the likes of Final A3000, Tanchjim Darling, and even Final E5000 waaaay better then most other dongles, but does not have enough power for RHA CL2, nor of course any demanding planar overear. iFi utilizes its 16-core XMOS controller and a 32-bit Cirrus Logic DAC. The other tech features are as follows; The physical design is clean and simple, with buttons on the side and a crisp OLED display on the front. An included case offers protection from scratches and fingerprints, as the shiny, larger body is prone to both. Today we are taking a look at what is probably the smallest piece of gear I have ever reviewed, the iFi Audio GObar. The GObar is what typically gets called a USB Dongle DAC/Amp nowadays. I’ve spent time with a few of these types of devices over the years, but it seems that in the last two years or so the availability of options on the market has absolutely exploded. It seems to be the case nowadays, especially from so called “Chi-Fi” companies, that they all have at least one product of this type in their line up. This type of product and its form factor does seem to have advanced rapidly in its capabilities, the GObar being one example of this. iFi is a fairly consistent example of pushing the amount of features available in a device in its given market space and form factor, and the GObar does seem to continue this trend.

GO Bar also has a +6dB High Gain mode. Unlike what happens e.g. on the GO Blu where gain selection follows an automatic system, on GO Bar it’s the user who has to manually set the device on High or Low Gain mode. If I had any issue with the Go bar, it would be with the “standard” pre-set digital filter. I found it a little hard in the upper mids, which means it won’t play nice with all headphones. On the other hand, I found the “Bit-Perfect” and “GTO” filters to be more universal, meaning they will sound better with more headphones. The frustration points doubled up because I actually liked the sound overall. I came away more disappointed than anything; like a good idea or two got lost along the way somewhere and were left behind.The iFi Go Bar I am reviewing is actually from Headphones.com and was sent to me from Precogvision of their team many months ago, but I still have it here for now. I'm not an IEM guy, so I basically ran through the headphone stands against all four units at least for a few minutes before settling into evaluation mode. Obviously throwing every headphone I had into a detailed accounting would have taken way longer than my allotment, but all four units seemed to manage everything I threw at them: HD280, HD558, HD650, HE5XX, OG Clear, even Atrium. Eventually I landed on the HD280 (v2016) for testing, as it's probably the most flat headphone in my kit right now. So the differences: Build Quality on Go Bar is standard dongle hard plastic thingy (dunno the build quality) that is better for outdoor use (but still use the included case), while the GOld Bar is in its stupid gold that get marks on it super easy is terrible to look at it. It isn't an OAFAS product, but it looks like one. Really hate the look of the GOld Bar and I would personally never get it since it looks dumb. I tested the dongles out of a MacBook Air and an iPhone 13 Mini, using Qobuz, and with the original Campfire Solaris (3.5 mm SE), the Letshuoer S12 with RD tape mod (4.4 bal), and the ESX900 headphones (3.5 mm SE). When plugging TRS plugs – the port delivers “normal” single-ended output. All single ended drivers on the market will seemlessly work in here. In addition to that, thanks to how internal cabling is designed they will also get 50% reduced crosstalk compared to what they would get from an ordinary single-edend port – for free.

My friend AudioPhil is really into his headphone gear. Recently he acquired the product above and asked if I might want to play with this for a few days... Sure, this looks interesting! Output impedance on both BE and SE ports are declared to be equal, both < 1Ω. A nicely low value, although not a superlow one. As I repeatedly mentioned, all the above refers to GO Bar’s Balanced Ended output. The Single Ended output is not at the same level, neither in terms of output power nor – most of all – in terms of sound quality. Even on easy to drive loads GO Bar Single Ended Out is perceivably duller, much scarcer in microdynamics and more closed-in on space reconstruction. Belonging to the group AMR (Abbingdon Music Research Group), which is one of the largest audio equipment manufacturers in the UK, iFi Audio is a manufacturer of several DACs and amplifiers, as well as other accessories for computer & home audio.Underneath the volume dial is a settings and Bluetooth function button, which can be pressed to cycle through various sound effects: XBass, XSpace, the two combined, or off entirely. When you do so, an LED on the top of the Go Blu glows yellow to signify you’re listening using XBass, light blue for XSpace, white for the two combined, or off when no profile is deployed. You also have a “Turbo” mode gain option, which gives you a considerable boost of +6dB for the most power-hungry headphones. This is accessed by pressing both volume buttons at the same time. While the features are abundant for a small little dongle DAC, I am not a big fan of how to determine what settings you are on. Over time, you can memorize or just remember what things once you get the hang of it, but the tiny LED dots, and the tiny text is already likely hard to read, but then you add in the fact that they chose a light grayish-blue (periwinkle?) text color on top of a dark gunmetal gray shell design, makes it exponentially harder to read, no matter how much light, what angle its coming from, or how much you squint. It's barely legible, if at all for me, as someone who doesn't require eyeglasses for anything. I had to look at my previous notes on this to see if I still agree. And yes I do agree that it is a quite powerful dongle with a great and musical sound and wide soundstage, but maybe not the most detailed. The DAC section is based around a 32-bit Cirrus Logic DAC chipset, which allows the Go bar to support up to 32-bit/384kHz PCM, native DSD, along with the full MQA unfold. This guarantees you will get the best sound possible from MQA files, which is vital for those streaming TIDAL Masters music.

For the most part, the Go Bar doesn't do anything wrong. It's quite neutral sounding to my ears, with no real emphasis in any part of the spectrum, unless you enable one of the digital processing effects. XBass+ gives a big boost to the bass region, with what I believe is a +10dB down-sloping curve through the bass region. This is not at the expense of the unity of the recording, you understand – the iFi isn’t prissy or analytical, it simply extracts and retains more of the minutiae of a performance than an unassisted laptop or smartphone has a prayer of doing.There’s also full MQA decoding on board, plus iFi’s popular XBass+ and XSpace analog-based sound effects. In addition, you can select between four digital filter settings (Bit-Perfect; no filter, Standard; the factory setting, Min. Phase, Gibbs Transient Optimised) to further tailor the sound. And yeah, I’ve always wondered why iFi loves the Burr Brown so much when there really isn’t anything special about it. It’s not to say it sounds bad or anything, but you’d think they’d try something else. Hey, perhaps price gouging with outdated chips is working for them? I have no idea. What I do know is that the wank fest is probably just getting started with regard to amps and dacs.

Disclaimer: The iFi GO bar was sent to us by iFi Audio in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. The company gave no input regarding the content included in this evaluation. iFi Audio is a sponsor of Hifitrends. Build/Features They have IEM Match, but on both headphones and IEM’s, I preferred just the straight out as the IEM Match felt kind of limiting and less dynamic, maybe even a bit muted. Firstly, next to the IEMatch switch on GO Bar we don’t find the usual “Ultra” / “High” engravings, but rather “3.5” and “4.4”. The GO Bar manual quite smokily says that “iEMatch reduces the output level, so that even the most sensitive In-Ear-Monitors (IEMs) can be matched to the GO bar”. Which is only a part of what a full-blown IEMatch does. And does not offer precise figures in terms of attenuations nor output impedances to help the user anticipate what he will get by plugging IEMs of specific impedance or sensitivity. As you can see from the side view, it's got a switch to tell it when you're using an IEM so as to reduce the output level, also there's an XBass+ bass boost, let me show you what they do: I also prefer this option because I haven't been a fan of iFi's preferred Gibbs Transient Optimized Digital Filter, aka the GTO Filter. The GTO filter reduces the taps in total, making it a short filter, and minimizes the pre and post-ringing, while also being asymmetrical. Typically, most DACs default to a symmetric filter with both pre- and post-ringing with a steep cut-off. What is best is sort of up to the user to decide.It would be interesting if another company would be able to match or exceed the output power of a dongle DAC/amp in the future without resorting to a secondary internal battery. A couple of models already exist (Shanling UA5 and Earmen Colibri) that feature this “hybrid power”, but only the Colibri is able to match the output power of the Go Bar (and only in balanced mode).