Light fantastic

The first one-box streamer from iFi looks superficially normal, but Ed Selley discovers there's rather more to it than meets the eye

- Ed Selley

The rate at which iFi Audio generates new products would allow for most pages of HFC to be dedicated over to them if we felt so inclined. But the quantity of products does conceal that some categories you might expect to find the company active in have hitherto not been contested. We have seen the ZEN Stream (HFC 485), which turns any DAC into a streamer - but until now we've not seen a one-box streamer. Enter the NEO Stream.

The long-awaited one-stop solution combines the company's decoding with a streaming platform in a single, usefully compact chassis. The decoding is closely related to the NEO iDSD DAC, which acquitted itself well in the Group Test in HFC 494 and is built around a Texas Instruments DAC combined with an output stage that makes use of various carefully selected high-spec components. Format handling is somewhere close to state of the art with PCM supported to 32-bit/768kHz and DSD512 (with DSD and DXD to boot).

Like the iDSD, the Stream is balanced and unbalanced (and has full preamp functionality), but its greater number of connections means there is no place for XLR- instead balanced operation is available solely via a single 4.4mm Pentaconn connector, which partners a conventional RCA out. If you want to use the iFi as a digital transport, every option you could realistically want is here, with optical, coaxial, AES, USB and i2S via HDMI available.

The NEO Stream is competitive with key rivals across most aspects of its connectivity, but where it takes a fairly distinctive departure is the network connectivity. Included is an 'OptiBox' intended to sit between your router and the streamer. Ethernet is connected at one end and an optical cable on a locking connector proceeds off to the NEO Stream where it connects by the same socket type. iFi says this reduces noise and improves latency.