Violectric DHA V226

tl;dr - good amp, faulty DAC in win 11, reliable preamp and horrid CS. I don't even know how to rate the various criteria because it's so wacky.

The amp is exceptional. Plenty of power on tap even without using the tip switches for additional gain. You have a heapdhone amp with 6.35, 4-pin XLR and 4.4 balanced in the same chassis as a DAC and has a good preamp function... Here's the problem, though. The DAC implementation is awful.

It relies on the barely functional Windows 11 native driver and playback stops and stutters every 30-60 seconds on Win 11 systems. Windows 10 works fine, but 11 is faulty with both PCM and DSD playback it stutters in Tidal, it stutters in just Windows system audio, Youtube, video games, Foobar and pretty much everything I could play audio with.

Customer Support one of the weirdest and least useful experiences of my life. My support thread started with 3 weeks without a reply. So I made a new one and after another 2 weeks an employee replied to me, informing me that they know how to use the BIOS and that the device works on their test system. Well, you're not giving the customer your test system, are you? The CS rep told me that "they disagree with my finding" and that my system "needs to be optimized for audio recording and playback" - whatever that means, since they all just kinda' worked out of the box for me over the past 29 years, as long as I've been using them, both with and without fancy audio gear. I asked them to acknowledge the fact that I have a problem with their product and that I need some sort of support, but once again I was told that the CS rep cannot agree with my conclusion and stopped replying. It's now been about 5 weeks since the last reply where I asked them to tell me how to solve the issue. For the sake of not completely trashing CS, there was a very strong language barrier between CS and I and I can only assume the person on the other end didn't really understand that they came across as unprofessional and dismissive of the issues of a paying customer, but with all the understanding in the world, I still had an expensive, product that didn't work properly for me. Thus, the product is returned and I'm back to my MOTU M4 and Audeze Deckard that work perfectly fine on the same system.

The moral of the story, if you made it this far, is to buy amps for Violectric, not rely on the quality of their CS, despite the stories on the internet and to get DACs with ASIO drivers, because they're more reliable.