A portable-audio maker from the start.

iBasso is a Shenzhen maker of portable audio equipment. Its Chinese website says it was founded in 2006 in Shenzhen, Guangdong, as a company devoted to “the research, development and production of high-quality portable music equipment,” and its English site gives the same year. Chinese business-encyclopedia entries list a company called Shenzhen iBasso Technology Co., Ltd. (深圳市艾巴索科技有限公司), in the Nanshan district, registered in September 2008; that registration is later than the year the brand gives for its founding, and we note the difference rather than resolve it. The Chinese name 艾巴索 (Aibasuo) is a phonetic rendering of iBasso.

Neither of the company’s official “About” pages names a founder, and we did not find one in the sources we checked, so we leave the question open rather than repeat an unsourced name.

What the company does publish is a product history, year by year. It says its first products, the T1, D1 and P1 — small headphone amplifiers and DAC-amplifiers — appeared in 2006, followed by the T2, the D2 Viper and the P2 in 2007. By 2008, with the D2, D3, D4 and P3, it says its products had won recognition on Head-Fi, the headphone forum where much of its early reputation was made, and were among the most discussed there. In 2009, it says, the Japanese audio company Hibino began importing its products, taking iBasso into Japan.

One more detail explains why the name may be less familiar in China than abroad. The company says it first sold there under a sub-brand, Mini Audio, and that the iBasso brand itself entered the Chinese market only in January 2016. Its English site says its products are sold in more than 30 countries.

From amplifiers to players.

The product that changed iBasso’s scale was a player. The DX100, which appeared in 2012, ran Google’s Android 2.3 and used ESS Technology’s Sabre ES9018 converter chip with 24-bit, 192kHz playback; its launch thread on Head-Fi ran to well over a hundred pages. iBasso’s own history calls it the world’s first Android audio player to support 24-bit/192kHz files, a claim we give as the company’s. The DX line has carried the brand since: the DX50 in 2013, the DX90 in 2014 and the DX80 in 2015 — both winners at Japan’s VGP awards, the company says — and the DX200 of 2016, which iBasso describes as the first portable player with two ES9028 Pro chips and which took swappable amplifier modules.

Those modules became a signature. Rather than building one fixed headphone output, several iBasso players accept interchangeable amplifier cards, and the current English site lists them as separate products, from the AMP8 MK2 to the AMP18. The company also branched into earphones and headphones: it says the IT03 hybrid in-ear monitor of 2016 was its first of that kind after entering China, and the SR1 of 2018 its first over-ear headphone of its own development. Its catalogue now runs from DX players such as the DX180, DX270 and DX340 to small USB converter dongles in the DC series, the D16 desktop converter, the PB6 “Nunchaku” portable amplifier and earphones including the 3T-154 and IT07.

Reviews have been mixed, as reviews should be. What Hi-Fi? tested the Android-based DX160 in February 2020 at £349, praised its specification and interface, but concluded that the player “crosses the line between ‘perky’ and ‘aggressive’ quite early, and never comes back,” and found its battery life only average. The same review put iBasso’s lifetime at “fast approaching 15 years,” which fits the 2006 founding. iBasso, for its part, lists awards from Japan’s VGP and Fujiya Avic headphone shows and the Guangzhou headphone show, and a five-star rating in the British magazine Hi-Fi World for the DX220.

Shenzhen and the headphone trade.

The seven brands in this guide come from one corner of southern China: the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong, around Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Dongguan. English Wikipedia notes that the delta’s industrial cities have been called the “Factory of the World” and describes the region as a major manufacturing base for electronics. Shenzhen became one of China’s first special economic zones in 1980; Zhuhai is another.

Much of that output carried other companies’ names. Darko.Audio reported in 2020 that the Dutch brand PrimaLuna’s products were built at Cayin’s factory, and the German magazine stereoplay wrote in 2021 that Cayin’s German distributor had created the Cayin brand in the late 1990s. The makers here now sell under their own names.

Valve amplifiers remain a speciality. Cayin and Line Magnetic, both Zhuhai companies, list them prominently in their ranges, and Shanling’s company history records a valve power amplifier in 2002.

Shanling, which began in Jieyang in eastern Guangdong, moved to Shenzhen in 1996; the city is also home to iBasso, which says it was founded there in 2006, and Questyle, founded in 2012. Cayin, founded in 1993, and Line Magnetic are in Zhuhai; Denafrips and Musician Audio are in Guangzhou, according to their own websites.

Much of the debate about them happens online — in reviews on Headfonics, Soundnews and Darko.Audio, and on the Audio Science Review forum, where a member posted measurements of Musician Audio’s first converter in 2020.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Development first.

On manufacturing, iBasso says less than some of its rivals. It describes itself as a maker that both develops and produces its equipment, and its English shop says orders ship from its distribution centre in China; we found no statement naming a factory or a contract manufacturer on its English or Chinese “About,” contact or policy pages. It sells directly worldwide with a one-year warranty, quoting prices in US dollars, as well as through dealers in each market, whose prices, it warns, vary with import fees and shipping.

Its self-description is about engineering. The Chinese page says that from the beginning iBasso has made research and development its highest aim, and it closes with a slogan that translates roughly as “born for hi-fi, heading toward the extreme.” The name itself is written with a lower-case “i,” and the website is set in Lato. No official colour values are published.

For a design guide, iBasso shows how a specialist brand can be built through enthusiast forums and a long run of numbered products. Compare FiiO, a fellow Chinese portable-audio maker, and Astell&Kern, the South Korean player brand. For this guide we use charcoal, gunmetal and a copper accent with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep iBasso’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.