Aurorasound HiFace DAC Pro Review

About to rule out a product because it doesn’t have USB? Read this first.

by Ed Selley
Hi-Fi Review

3

Recommended
Aurorasound HiFace DAC Pro Review
MSRP: £480.00

What is the Aurorasound HiFace?

When I reviewed Yamaha’s rather splendid RX-A3040, I could really only mark the lack of a high quality asynchronous USB output against it. Connecting a computer to a connection of this nature is the fastest way to start listening to high res audio and lossless streaming services. To this end, the number of products sporting a USB connection has ballooned in recent years and the computer has been firmly welcomed into the HiFi fold. As a result of this, I have seen discussions here and elsewhere where products that otherwise perfectly meet people’s criteria have fallen by the wayside because they lack the all important USB connection.

This needn’t be the case, USB DACs have tumbled in price in the same period and offer impressive performance. Furthermore, USB has power as part of the transmission, you don’t need a mains plug to make it work. What if you want something as more than a convenience feature though? This slightly austere looking little black box is firmly at the artisan-end of USB technology and has a slightly convoluted origin. Furthermore, as well as being able to operate as a standalone product, it includes a unique upgrade power supply option as well. So if you are looking for a convenient computer hookup, do these little black boxes deliver the goods?

What is the tuned DAC Pro?

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
First up, the circumstances as to how this product comes to exist in this form are reminiscent of an Attenborough documentary. The basic architecture of the device and half the name are courtesy of an Italian company called M2Tech. This company has built up quite a name for itself by producing some sophisticated digital to analogue, analogue to digital format convertors. You can buy a HiFace DAC Pro from them and very good it is too.

What you see here though is a HiFace which has trundled off to Japan to be given a thorough tune up by a company called Aurorasound. Japanese companies generally divide into large, omnipresent and corporate and small, artisan and periodically quirky and Aurorasound sits happily in the second category. Having mainly concentrated on the analogue side of things they now tweak the HiFace DAC Pro and the HiFace Two, USB to SP/Dif converter.

The Italian HiFace DAC uses a USB A connection and outputs to a 3.5mm analogue socket. Contained in its rather prosaic black crackle chassis, the Aurorasound version uses USB-B (which is the more conventional connection for this role) and fits a larger quarter inch jack to serve as the analogue out. They then proceed to adjust how the HiFace takes power from a USB socket in a bid to reduce interference and in a bid to improve matters further and offer a product that may well be unique.

What does the BusPower Pro do?

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
The BusPower Pro, as well as sounding like the strangest superhero in history is a distinctive but logical solution to a known issue. USB is self powered which means that the HiFace can be used without troubling your mains sockets but there are some catches to this convenience. A quick look inside a laptop will reveal that it isn’t exactly perfect as a power source for an audio product. The supply feeds a variety of different functions in the laptop meaning it isn’t exactly optimised for any of them.

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
Aurorasound has tried to improve the HiFace’s resistance to noise on the USB supply but logical to a fault, feels that a dedicated power supply is the best option. The BusPower Pro sits between the computer and the HiFace, strips out the supplied power and applies a filtered supply from an external power supply. This naturally removes one intrinsic advantage of the HiFace, in that it doesn’t need a plug but equally it offers the potential for higher performance as and when you need it.
This means that with a notional maximum sample rate of 32/384kHz, the HiFace is comfortably state-of-the-art.

Why choose these components?

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
There is no arguing that at £370 for the HiFace Pro and an extra £99 for the power supply, these are products that cost more than similar rivals and indeed many excellent conventional USB DACs. The main selling point for the Aurorasound HiFace is that all the good bits of the basic Italian version haven’t been altered. This means that with a notional maximum sample rate of 32/384kHz, the HiFace is comfortably state-of-the-art. It only functions via a dedicated driver on the M2Tech website and the measured performance has been published a few times and is generally considered excellent.

Aurorasound has then addressed the only real performance issue that M2Tech can’t - the power supply - and improved the connectors at the same time. The result is unapologetically specialised but still offers a huge amount of potential performance at a relatively sensible price. Aurorasound is the sort of company that has little interest in being all-things to all-people but when they do build something, they make strenuous efforts to make it worthwhile.

What are the downsides?

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
When combined together, the HiFace and BusPower Pro are more expensive than an Arcam irDAC (which admittedly tops out at a mere 24/192kHz) and offers considerably less in the way of features. There is also little in the way of real flexibility to them. Although it has a headphone output as the only analogue connection, the only way to use the HiFace as a headphone amp is to use the volume on the computer or the playback software which may or may not involve bit reduction which is far from ideal. Basically, unless you need a line level USB DAC, this is a slightly pricey and not terribly attractive curio.

It is also not a particularly easy one to get going. With a site in Japanese, unless you know to look on the M2Tech site for the driver, the HiFace will do nothing at all. Even when you do find the driver, the nature of the software and the fairly small number of downloads means it will set any piece of antivirus software into full attack dog mode. This is not a plug and play device.

How was the Aurorasound tested?

The HiFace was used with and without the BusPower Pro into a Yamaha RX-A3040 connected to Elipson Planet M satellites and a Tannoy TS2.12 sub. It was also tested with an Elipson Music centre and Planet L speakers (these were in for a different publication- I’ve not suddenly purchased the entire Elipson product range on a whim). The source was my Lenovo ThinkPad T530. Material used included lossless and high res FLAC via Foobar as well as TIDAL, Spotify and general web material.

What does the HiFace Sound like running on its own?

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
If you are prepared to tangle with USB drivers and put the effort in, this little DAC can prove to be immediately arresting in terms of performance. The most important part of the presentation of the HiFace is that it is entirely free of any sense of ‘digital.’ The HiFace manages to be startlingly vivid but at the same time extremely easy to listen to. With the beautiful unplugged version of Ben Howard’s The Wolves, the HiFace is incredibly immediate in the way it reproduces material.

There is very little sense of intervening electronics, just a slightly crusty bloke and his guitar right there, smack between the speakers. Every aspect of the recording is right there, every string pluck, every vowel. This extremely vivid, almost hyperreal presentation is something that I’ve encountered from time to time but where the HiFace differs from the norm is that it manages to avoid the fatigue or harshness that can creep in with a very upfront presentation of this nature and that it does this for a price that does seem a little more reasonable once you’ve spent some time with it.

Aurorasound HiFace Pro
Neither is this a neat party trick that only happens when you play sumptuously mastered and minimalist pieces either. With the congested, flawed but tremendously entertaining Royal Blood debut album, the HiFace manages to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear by keeping that sense of immediacy and sheer energy but making the best of what is a fairly grim piece of mastering. There is a sense that if you partnered this little DAC with very forward or aggressive electronics, you could tip it over into being a bit much but with remotely balanced electronics and both Yamaha and Elipson are brands that certainly do that - it is a deeply impressive balancing act.

It isn’t without curiosities though. Having tinkered with the HiFace for a week or so, I would say that although it has some of the highest sample rate handling of anything I’ve tested, the performance is actually deeply consistent across standard 44.1kHz and higher res material. This is not to say that the performance isn’t extremely good with high res - the 88.2kHz version of Kraftwerk’s Minimum Maximum has the power and scale needed to shine and the bass response is truly mighty - but the presentation of the HiFace is sufficiently distinctive that it delivers much of what it does with whatever you play on it. All things have their limits though and if you let the bitrate drop too far on compressed material, you will know all about it.
Aurorasound HiFace Pro
This little DAC can prove to be immediately arresting in terms of performance.

How does the HiFace sound with the BusPowerPro connected?

As it was fairly simple to do so, I was able to carry out a few experiments where my wife would connect up the HiFace and elect whether or not to use the BusPower Pro so I could effectively test the effectiveness of the external power supply by not knowing if it was connected or not. The results of this slightly unorthodox experiment did auger fairly well for the add-on box. With the BusPower Pro connected, the presentation of the HiFace remains extremely immediate but there is a little more width and scale to the presentation. The performance gets a little bigger in that there is a greater sense of the space it was recorded in and more perception of each instrument’s relationship to the others.

Is this worth £100? There is little arguing that it puts the resulting product in competition with better featured products that are also extremely good sonically and it also means you need a mains socket spare. Equally, if you are adding USB functionality to system you are already happy with, it gives the performance a useful extra boost. It is also something you don’t need right away. It is hardly bulky either. Even with both components in situ, we are still talking about something roughly the size of a fag packet which even the most space constrained ought to be able to deal with.

Conclusion

Pros

  • Superbly real and visceral presentation
  • Extremely wide sample rate support
  • Compacy

Cons

  • Fairly pricey
  • Limited spec
  • Not that easy to setup

Aurorasound HiFace DAC Pro Review

Even in an industry of niche products, what you see here is a very specialised proposition. Many mainstream products are now being fitted with USB inputs that are at least 24/96 capable and an increasing number offer driver-based 192kHz playback. I can say with some confidence that most of these stock inputs will be easier to set up than this Italian-Japanese oddity. This being said, when you do have a product that does one thing, you can be sure that it is going to do it very well and this little box is capable of startling performance.

Listening to Tidal through the Yamaha - something which would otherwise require a more space-consuming solution - has been deeply enjoyable and effortlessly simple; straight into the front input - no messing with power or the like - and you are away. If you then want to take a very good system indeed and install it more permanently while boosting performance further, you have the option to do so with the BusPower Pro. This is a quirky and not wholly straightforward product but it is also a bloody good one.

Scores

Build Quality

.
.
8

Connectivity

.
.
.
7

Ease of Use

.
.
.
7

Features

.
.
8

Audio Performance

.
9

Value for Money

.
.
8

Verdict

.
.
8
8
AVForumsSCORE
OUT OF
10

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