Description
The ZEN Blue immediately impresses with its sturdy aluminium enclosure, unusual at such a low
price. But what really sets it apart is the circuitry within – as always, iFi has gone to great lengths to
ensure that sound quality over Bluetooth is the best it can be, even if it has to be designed from the
ground up.
Bluetooth reception represents a mere convenience for many audio manufacturers, enabled in the
simplest and cheapest way to ‘tick a box’ on the features list. But the manner in which Bluetooth is
implemented – the quality of signal processing and the circuitry that surrounds it – has a big impact
on performance. Not all Bluetooth sounds the same, and iFi engineers its products to obtain the best
possible performance from every audio source – Bluetooth streaming included.
With the ZEN Blue, this starts with a state-of-the-art Qualcomm QCC5100 chip to process the
incoming data – the ZEN Blue is the first product of its kind to benefit from this new-generation
Bluetooth IC.
All the latest 24-bit-capable Bluetooth audio formats are supported, including Qualcomm’s aptX
Adaptive and aptX HD, Sony’s LDAC and Huawei’s HWA – no other Bluetooth streamer boasts this
cutting-edge hi-res specification. Other codecs covered include regular aptX and aptX Low Latency,
AAC (the favoured format of Apple iOS devices) and SBC (the ‘plain vanilla’ Bluetooth codec). This
means that every possible source device is covered at the highest audio resolution its Bluetooth
specification allows.
The Qualcomm QCC5100 offers a ‘system-on-a-chip’ Bluetooth solution, with all functions covered
including D-to-A conversion. Many manufacturers would simply rely on this chip to deliver the DAC
function, but this is not the iFi way. The ZEN Blue has separate digital and analogue stages; to feed
the analogue stage, the processed digital signal is routed from the QCC5100 to a specialised DAC
chip from ESS Technology’s Sabre family to convert the signal from digital to analogue.
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