The HiBy FD1 & Beans is an affordable compact USB-powered DAC/ amplifier and a single dynamic driver IEM combo. They are priced at $59 and $69 respectively.
Disclaimer: The HiBy FD1 & Beans were sent to us as samples in exchange for our honest opinion in this review. We thank HiBy Music for this opportunity.
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Note, this review follows our new scoring guidelines for 2021 which you can read up on here.
Hiby has dug into the niche and brought to us an interesting combo for more flexibility and fun this time – the Beans and the FD1. These two are designed to stack neatly with the R2 we previously reviewed in 2020. The modular design, a portable DAP, DAC Amp, and IEM comes together as a portable suite, but they are all capable as standalone products.
The Beans IEM comes with a 10mm carbon nanotube diaphragm equipped driver and silver-plated OFC detachable cable. The FD1, on the other hand, is a USB-powered compact DAC/amplifier featuring balanced and unbalanced outputs.
Undoubtedly this is one of the most affordable stack combos in the market, we have taken a good look at the R2 earlier and this time we will find out what the rest of the combo can do with the additional two pieces of the puzzle!
TECH HIGHLIGHTS
FD1
The FD1 is largely driver-free, device powered, and supports Android, iOS, Windows, macOS driverless. You can hook it up with smartphones, computers, tablets, and digital audio players with the supplied USB-C cables.
Inside the FD1, the decoder and amplifier house dual ES9118 DAC chips with dual active crystal oscillators for lower jitter, phase noise, and higher signal accuracy.
The oscillators are separately clocked for multiples of 44.1Hz and 48Hz audio signals with support up to native DSD128 or 32BIT/384k PCM decoding, (on Windows 10 drivers are required for DSD).
When paired with the R2 the output power and decoding quality are clearly enhanced and it will also expand the R2’s I/O with an additional 2.5mm balanced output.
BEANS
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