HiBy FD5

This is a desktop-calibre HiBy that will drive your Empire Ears Raven, Subtonic Audio Storm or Symphonium Audio Crimson with total confidence from your mobile and computing devices.

More importantly, its warm, rich tuning will offer lovely synergy and timeless value with revealing transducers such as Final Audio's D7000, Fostex's TH900 MKII, Canpur's CP74E, Craft Ears Aurum, Elysian Acoustic Labs' Annihilator, PlusSound's Allegro and the Vision Ears Elysium EXT.

HiBy's first DAC/amp is not without flagship genes despite being on a budget. It not only borrows its analog stage from the R8II statement DAP. It also goes one better, doubling the output transistor count on FD5 to 32 to handle the abundant current its separate power supply can produce. 

With such a discrete output stage HiBy immediately takes a big step ahead of the chasing pack of pedestrian op-amp competitors. Its individual transistors provide the power necessary to push big HIFIMANs and Rosson Audio Designs – not to mention Subtonic's Storm and Symphonium's Crimson – on a budget.

Its ability to reel in highly-detailed, exacting and even punishingly revealing gear will, in fact, see it increasingly appreciated down the road.

The ability of discrete output devices to handle current and push power is a given, and a necessary HiBy trademark given FD5's power supply sporting several thousand microfarads of filtering capacitors. It's a powerhouse that's escaped the pocket and now has the stage, and the limelight. 

At the tip of HiBy's spear, an abundance of 32 output transistors ensure excellent current-handling for good reason, to reap the full benefit of FD5's separate power supply that can draw power from the wall on demand. They can be biased into Class A, if you so choose.

Differentiating itself from even other flagships that cling to op-amp layouts seeking THX-certification but with inordinate amounts of gain and feedforward/feedback, HiBy's linearity remains excellent already in the open-loop, owing to its high Class A bias.

FD5's quiescent current ensures individual transistors are working in optimum condition. Distortion and noise are kept low, without resorting to the excessive use of negative feedback. The fidelity of four Asahi Kasei Microdevices (AKM) DACs, being fed pristine I2S by HiBy's FPGA and dual clock oscillators, are totally preserved.

To build on its impressive, regulated, miniature power supply, HiBy designed a true-balanced differential amplifier to further improve FD5's linearity, and you can count on common-mode rejection at its best whenever you plug in via 4.4mm preserving its resolution.

Send this brute power into your transducers directly, or set up FD5 as a hub to also decode digital for a downstream amplifier via separate line outputs around back. It brings convenience too – on top of its USB input, it accepts Bluetooth LDAC feeds too.

When you're done with FD5 at the desk move onto HiBy's portable DAPs here, or explore other desktop DAC/amp upgrades here.