Boys and girls, the pre-order for E12DIY limited run has started. Read detail here. If you are really interested, you need to put US$19 deposit as E12DIY is basically not a commercial product (*no-money-to-be-made) for FiiO and it will only go into production if a minimum 500 units are pre-ordered (and stop at 2000 units)

Note: the page said $20 but they change it to $19 (if they haven't updated already) in order to differentiate the payment from others. Just put a note in teh Paypal payment so they'll know.

This post has been edited by ClieOS: Aug 9 2013, 05:03 PM

No soldering skill needed. Just need to know how to plug / unplug opamp and buffer.

Again, no soldering is needed. Everything has been pre-soldered before arrival. All you need to do is swap them out.

Opamp comes in both dual or single channels version. Obviously you will need dual channels to get a stereo sound. So if you have single channel chip, they need to be mounted on a special adapter so two single chips can function together like a dual chip. This will have been pre-soldered on the right adapter on E12DIY so again, no need for you to do any work except to swap out whatever chip(s) you want.

If you have no experience at all, my suggestion is to read into the basic knowledge on opamp. If you are really afraid you are going to mess them up, then you need to rethink if E12DIY is the right choice or not. For the same price, there are excellent portable amps out there too.

This post has been edited by ClieOS: Aug 9 2013, 08:26 PM

E17 is better, for both features as well as SQ.

As far as I know, there isn't any FiiO that has Asyn USB.

Good news for anyone who pre-ordered the E12DIY: It is official! FiiO has announced they have collected enough pre-order to give it a go.

Yes.

As an USB-to-Coax convertor for another DAC that only has COAX-in?

Err? It is the same size as the original E10, which is smaller than the E18 by quite a bit.

Most likely just a dead LED, which isn't that uncommon for blue LED that can't be turned off.

Yes, if the actual amp component fails, it very likely will have no sound output at all. The LED is independent of the volume knob, so I'll suspect your volume control comes from elsewhere. Might want to check your gain switch and software volume setting as well.

Both the headphone-out and line-out comes from the DAC. but there is no amplification for the line-out, where the headphone-out has a dedicated headphone amp inside.