there's not a lot of companies out there that everything they make and I look at
I go God damn that is genuinely like
excellent and JDS Labs who make the product we're about to look at here
this the element 4 they're brand new
headphone DAC amp combo unit thing if
you're not familiar this thing make your headphone sound good and power your
headphone good this is no exception I I
hope I mean I haven't experienced it yet but look at it here I mean you can see
it on the box where does it say on the box look look you see this boom sound as
science their whole stick is making audio equipment that is genuinely
awesome not only just to look at I mean damn that looks good but to use and
apparently their customer service is phenomenal although I've only ever talked to them like one time now if
you're not familiar or you haven't guessed what this is meant to do it's a
headphone amp and Dack so you take this bad girl with this included USBC cable
Wong you plug it into your computer it's
going to show up as an audio output device and then you plug in a pair of headphones and you listen to it it has
apparently 3.2 watts of output power now
that might not sound like a lot of Watts uh in the context of normal stuff like
uh I don't know like a CPU you know that might be hundreds of Watts but three
watts of audio like right next to your
head like this that is a lot of Watts
especially if they're like in your headphones in your ears 3 Watts there
you're going to blow your freaking eardrums out the wazu let's look at the
back we've got the USBC that is just a data connection it's not USB PD I think
no there's no way uh with audio equipment the power supply situation is
very important and we'll get to that in a second we've got RCA outs because you
can use this not only for your headphones but if you had uh a set of
speakers with an amplifier you can switch between the headphone output
which is out there on the front we've got an optical toss link input if you
have a fan player maybe or like a I don't know a
fancy record player might have toss link maybe they don't I don't know Blu-ray
player that that's something that could have toss link we've got a mode button
this switches between the USB and toss link input and then a power button and
our DC input which is actually never mind it is not DC now curiously this
isn't really like a traditional AC to DC power supply It's actually an AC toac
Transformer so it takes 120 volt AC because we're in North America and
outputs 17v AC which is maybe a bit
strange if you're used to like you know normal Electronics usually it's a DC
input uh but with audio equipment
specifically you don't really want to rely on a third party power supply
manufacturer who might have like varying quality control stuff so instead of
doing that they take an AC input and then convert that to the DC power for
all the amplification and the digital to analog conversion inside the unit that
way they can build the electronics exactly how they want and do all the QC
in-house a little bit easier it's also the same reason why your receiver just
takes 120 volt instead of having a big power supply outside they do that stuff
inside where they have control apparently some people were not stoked
that it has USBC and doesn't do USBC power but I can understand you need to
have really clean power to have the level of like signal to noise ratio that
these things have um and I imagine doing that over USB is exceedingly more
difficult than when you have a very controlled sour like this I remember when they released the first element
everyone was like tripping over this knob The Twist motion ooh it's nice it's
not the nicest knob I've ever knobbed in my life you know they like really fancy
receivers you like turn them and it's like soft like it's not not soft but I
feel like there's an inconsistent resistance a little bit
it's a good knob I mean in the nobless world we live in the bar is very low and
I will I would happily accept this knob I would knob this knob
regularly I think the kind of weird feel that I'm getting from it actually might
make sense because it allows you to be like a little bit more precise like it
stops Now by default when you click the knob it switches between the
quarter-inch headphone output on the front using the headphone amp and the
RCA outputs here so if you have a set of speakers with a separate amp you just go
boom now I'm speakers boom now I'm headphone really nice feature there's
also an OLED screen you see that
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clicking our Link in the video description I think this is a 3ish foot
USB a Toc cable now I feel like for most
people who are going to have this at their desk this is fine but if you rock
a laptop especially a Macbook like I was
planning to plug into this that's a problem do I have a
dongle a no way it's almost like I use a
Macbook I'm used to this look at that
baby now for the price of this device which
we'll get into in a little bit JDS y'all best be including one of these dongles
in the Box all right all right for test
listening we've got the Sennheiser SL
drop hd8 XX headphones these are like a
slightly costed down version of the
hd800s which is the headphones I have at home so this is perfect I guess while
we're here we can talk a little bit about the nerdy stuff for the Nerds this
has the screen has Gorilla Glass that's random but I like it the big new thing
with this is the parametric EQ it has a
10 band EQ which is super cool but you
don't have to run software on it what it is is a tool that runs in your web
browser like a website and then when you connect your amp to the website it
flashes the settings whatever you set to the device over basically a USB serial
connection so once you've made that profile or changes or whatever you want
want uh you can take this amp somewhere else plug it in and it'll still have all
the settings saved and you don't have to run any software on your computer which
is so nice it also has automatic gain
control like I mentioned earlier when it automatically switches you can hear the
relay supposedly perfect Channel balance all the way down to minus 127.5 dbfs
it's got preamp outputs which means you can control the volume of your speakers
when you're in speaker mode if I switch it there see we're in RC output I can
change the volume of my speakers on here it's
got the super nice knob which is customizable and it supports up to 32bit
384 khz PCM with their fancy UAC 2 setup
oh and the 10 band EQ specifically is supported from 44.1 to 192 khz they can
do two bands at higher rates if you're a super nerd that cares a lot about like
signal to noise ratio and stuff like that this is well beyond the audible
range of a person but if you do care you
can check out out the audio science review which they already did of this thing and it rided very very well let's
um listen to some music I
guess these
um wow I don't know if I've ever listened to these headphones like this
before it's reallying
loud wow I just can't believe that this has so
much like range like you can play all
the way up to like obscenely loud on
these headphones and it doesn't sound it it doesn't sound distorted or
crushed or anything it sounds it's too good it might actually just be too good
it actually literally says in the instructions the element 4 can amplify
headphones to Dangerously loud audio listen safely to conserve your hearing
hearing l.org that's so funny the cool thing about
having the screen on here is a I mean you can see your uput game but it also shows you the sampling rate that you're
using right now so right now we're on 44.1 khz in theory we can go higher than
that I don't know how to change that on macOS though if I hold the whoa look at
that oh my God there's all these options we've got UI settings DSP config USB
audio class mute inactive USB s SPD mode
uh DAC configuration satisfactory reset DAC configuration what's that Max sample
rate yeah okay oh see so by default it
it it's 192 khz USB audio class ah this
is a cool one so if you have something like a Nintendo switch which uses UAC 1
if you have a device that only supports UAC 2 then it wouldn't work with your
Nintendo switch however JD has thought about this and they have two different
modes so if you have a device that only supports UAC 1 you can go into the
settings here you can change it to UAC 1
damn son this thing's cool connect to device oh here we go JDS Labs connect
look at that that that's so cool okay so I have the old version of this thing the
element 3 boosted and you can't change
the settings anyway other than using the knob and it's a really small screen so
while you can do it it is a little bit tricky so being able to change all of
those settings or at least it seems like a fair number of them in here is really
nice and you can share your profile that's so smart you can even save your
profile to your account oh my God these guys they think it's things and so if I
get the link and then you can send that to your friend if you like made a cool
profile for your headphones and your friend has the same headphones you can send it to him and try it out or if you
had speakers same deal it's a little tricky on title to actually find clips
that are 192 khz so almost everything I found so far is 24bit 44.1 khz but I
want to try something that's 192 even though I'm not going to be able to tell the
difference uh apparently Africa by Toto
is yeah it is it totally is look it
switched like actually completely maxed out it it's it's loud but it's still not
painfully loud if that gives you an idea of how hard these headphones are to
drive this is the first headphone amp that I've used that has actually been
like okay this is like really enough to get these to the point that I would is
uncomfortable to listen at like it's uncomfortable it's not painful but it's
not a listening level I would like B Shamir to come come come do a listen and
they actually sound not bad outside of the headphones I can't hear a thing
you're saying I said they sound not bad outside
of the headphones yeah no they sound really good I only use airpods this is
this is like much better try try and like turn it up sure like it's actually
kind of crazy how loud they get and without being distorted that is a good
KN by the way wow that's crazy it's really just as good but loud yeah
there's a really cool piece of software called sonar Works sound ID they
basically do pre-made calibration profiles for headphones to try to get
them to be flatter which not always the
best for everyone but for a Creator or
like somebody who's doing audio mastering if you can make your
headphones flatter that's good the nice thing about it is for these headphones
specifically or or the hd800s which is what these are based off of they're a
little spicy in the highend and there's a little bit of um base lacking one
might say and you can tweak it a little bit with sound ID but I don't want to
have to run the software so if I could get there profile in JDS Labs core which
is the online EQ thing that would be pretty sick I was expecting that you
would have to like edit the profile and then flash it like wait a sec and then
it would be active I can live edit
this yo that's so cool there's a second
of it like cutting out but it's almost
instantaneous a dude dude H God damn it
I'm going to have to buy these now I'm going to have to buy this now here let's
look at this frequency response they even have a Q setting which is like the
width of the frequency range you're adjusting in that band so let's say that
the um hd800s according to this graph has a bit of a bump at 1,000 htz you can
more specifically Target 1,000 is htz if
you're really trying to like tune a pair of headphones properly you would use
like a hat with little microphones inside to actually measure what the
frequency response would be like that would be a far more proper way to do
this than me janky looking at this graph
but dude this is so cool I already feel like I'm I'm vibing with a little more
bass this is definitely not the way to do this um but I toned down you know
looking at a graph of like somebody else's headphone frequency response I
don't even know if it's normalized like all this stuff it's not the proper way to do this um but I was just kind of
ballparking it it toned down the top end
brought the the subbase up a little bit I I think it does sound better and
and the fact that it just works instantly like it's a there's a touch of
a cutout but it's fast enough that you can hear the difference immediately and
kind of give yourself a reference and and really allow you to tune your
playback to what you would prefer I said earlier that they like have stuff that's
reasonably priced and they do JDS Labs makes a lot of really awesome products
and they do make ones that are a little bit more on the um affordable range of
things their most popular ones the atom daging amp you can get for 150 for the
DAC and 130 for the amp not nearly as powerful but still really good wow the
El amp is on sale too but the element 4
which comes with both integrated in it's exactly what you're looking at here this
is 550 us compared to some of the other
things that have this much output power it's not really egregious considering
that and the feature set um it is genuinely really awesome seems like
sounds great doesn't sound distorted audio is such a subjective thing but
this is designing a device that is supposed to take the subjectiveness out
of it it's supposed to just be objectively excellent and honestly I use
their atom Dack for my main speakers because I like having discrete output
devices um and it's great too but having
one unit with all the stuff packed in there it's pretty damn impressive it's
not cheap but if you have expensive headphones and you care about your audio sounding like it's supposed to sound
like and you like being able to EQ like I just showed you without running
software this might be a very good option for you assuming you can stomach
the cost it's a premium product and it's
not trying to hide that but my God is it ever good you know what else is
good me at asking you to hit subscribe
and hit the like button and listening to
music I'm just going to I'm just going to do this a little bit more we should
just have the outro of this video just be like 30 seconds longer than it
actually is and just be listening to Tunes