Fiio Olympus E10 Headphone Amp & DAC Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,550 words · ~7 min read
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vengance gaming to learn more now I've always said when people ask me for a
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sound card recommendation buy the cheapest ASUS Zonar card that you can
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afford or the most expensive one you can afford whichever works best for you buy
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an ASUS's own art now the reason I created the Linus Tech tips Forum was
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because a lot of the time there's people who know better than me especially when
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it comes down to the nitty-gritty details of a given category and the
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audio sub Forum reached out to me and said yo lonus we don't like that
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recommendation because it's not always necessarily true there are great options
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out there and one of them happens to be the F Olympus E10 USB amp and DAC and
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what this is is it is a sound card alternative so for those of you who
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don't know what a DAC is it stands for digital to analog converter and what it
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does is it Tak takes a digital signal which your music is unless you're
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talking about like you know records or cassette tapes so it takes a digital
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signal and turns it into an analog output that can be interpreted by
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headphones or speakers or other kinds of inherently Analog Devices so it has a
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couple of advantages versus a sound card that goes inside your computer number
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one is it sits outside your computer so you can use it with a desktop you can use it with a notebook you can use it
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with uh PC Mac it doesn't really it doesn't really matter it just plugs in
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Via mini USB B so there's that Port
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right there which I actually don't mind micro is the one I hate there's been
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some confusion about this lately so there you go it just plugs in by that
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and then plugs into a USB port on the computer Advantage number two is because
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it is completely removed from the internals of your PC there's no real
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risk of electromagnetic interference now many internal sound cards have things
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like shields on them but obviously it's better to move away from the Emi and put
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an aluminum Shield over the whole device anyway so without further Ado oh yeah
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right the next Advantage is superb sound quality at a very low cost so f is
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particularly known for this they are extremely upfront about exactly what
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components you're getting inside what kind of specs they're running in fact
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you can go on the specifications of their website they're kind of like swifttech this way where other water
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block manufacturers are just like oh it has the best flow it has this it has
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that where swifttech just takes all their blocks and runs scientific
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comparisons and just gives you the straight grasp it's like look this is how it performs exactly so on their site
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you can check out things like response curves and you can actually see they're
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not just saying oh well it has a you know flat uh frequency respon no they're
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actually showing you exactly how much it has and then to go along with the base
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boost button which is right here so there's actually a plus 3 D base boost
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they actually show you what the curve looks like once you've enabled that as well and it looks quite good so you're
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getting quite a lot of Base up at the I guess I should mirror it so you're
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getting quite a lot of Base up here and then it comes down into more of that
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flat curve that you saw before you enable base boost now the more steep that line is the more Punchy the bass
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will sound particularly at the low end and the more uh gradual that line is the
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more it's going to affect the midtones as well but of course because you have
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this data you can make an educated decision before you buy the product now
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let's take a close look at the Olympus itself so here on the front there's a
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potentiometer which is their fancy way of saying volume control that is what
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happens to be inside of a volume control unit but most uh most people won't
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necessarily care too much about that there's a volume or not volume indicator
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there's an power indicator led the Basse boost button I talked about before in
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all likelihood I would keep that off however if you do like more bass it is
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recommended to use base boost that's built into a high quality amp in Dack
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versus using something in software because and I guess I'm about to go on a
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bit of a rant here software eqs are not the Beall and endall I was talking about
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uh I was talking on Twitter about the audio output quality of the HTC1 and I
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was complaining about it and people said oh we'll just get you know power ramp and you know set up your e no no no no
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no no I have power ramp and I've set up my EQ that doesn't change the fact that
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the hardware inside the HTC1 is not as good as the iPhone 4 which is what I was
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comparing it to there is no substitute for better Hardware so you yes using
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Hardware to adjust EQ settings will be better than using software at least in
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this case that's what file has to say about it and I tend to agree with them
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on the back of the unit we've got the USB in we've got a coaxial out now this
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is kind of a funny one to me because um coax seal is going to be carrying a
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digital audio signal and it won't be Amplified so you've got a DAC and amp
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and then you're going to send a non non- decoded non-amplified um anyway uh so
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the the purpose of it is if you wanted to run something like an AV receiver
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which has its own ampen Dack off of like your MacBook which obviously doesn't
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have a coax out then you could go USB in to coax out and then you could play your
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music off there if you really wanted to do something like that but whatever um
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also on the back there's a line out so you can use that to plug into something
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like powered speakers so it really does take the place of a sound card in your
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system and particularly for mobile users where it's difficult to add a sound card
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or for uh people who don't necessarily have more expansion slots like if you
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run an ITX machine or matx machine that's full of graphics cards these can
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be a fan fantastic option on the bottom there's one thing that I had actually
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missed there so there's a low or high gain switch this is basically for
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headphones that are lower or higher impedance so you want to turn the gain
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up if you have high impedance headphones and the E10 can handle up to 300 ohm
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headphones and then you want to turn it down for anything down to it's rated to
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around 16 ohm headphones um so 16 to 300
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ohms the last thing that's included are eight little rubber feet so you can
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actually put those wherever you wanted if you wanted it to stand on you know
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this way then you could do that or this way or you could put all eight of them on at the same time I don't know
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whatever the reason they include eight is they include eight of them and I
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guess what's left to wrap up with is uh
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why this because F has a ton of different products some of which are
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just amps so they're meant to take a source from something like an MP3 player
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and just amplify it if you have higher impedance headphones that are going to
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not run very well directly off of your iPhone or Android phone or whatever else
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they have regular dacks that don't include amps they have an MP3 player
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they have a wide variety of products so the reason that we are going to start
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with this one is because it is of particular interest to PC users it's
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only around 70 bucks which means that if
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as long as it's outputting pretty darn decent sound which to my understanding
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it should haven't tried it yet but I will um that makes it very competitive
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with other sound card options that are available thank you for checking out
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this unboxing and overview of the file E10 don't forget to subscribe to lus
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