iFi Go Link Max Review

Price

In the UK, the Go Link Max is available for £79. Distribution is extensive and it is simple to order the iFi online should you wish to avoid leaving your house. In the US it is priced at $79 (although, it has been hard to verify if places stating this price have stock). In Australia it retails for $139 AUD.

You might reasonably ask why the Go Link Max is many times the price of something like the Apple USB C to 3.5mm adapter (currently for sale from Apple for £9) when it looks to do much the same thing. I will get into the nuts of bolts of that in due course.

Design

• Small but extremely solid
• Can show sample rate via an LED on the body
• Fixed cable is a potential point of vulnerability
• Useful set of adapters included

The GO Link Max comprises two metal sections, one significantly larger than the other, linked together by an umbilical cable. It’s small enough to be the sort of thing you accidentally machine wash; a fate that the review sample has nearly endured twice, but it’s impressively solid.

The metal sections are extremely solid and well finished and the quality of the paint on the chassis is exceptionally good as well. You can spend quite a bit more than this and not achieve the same level of finish.

There’s a display too… sort of. The GO Link Max has an LED indicator that will show the sample rate the unit is receiving and confirm you are listening to what you think you are. It will require you to commit a number of colours to memory but this seems to be a hobby that much of the audio industry is engaged in so I can’t really single iFi out here.

The fixed cable is something specific to the GO Link models (the more ornate GO Bar does without it). Part of me worries that it makes the whole DAC a little more vulnerable if you snag the cable (although, if you were to snag the larger housing, the resistance on the USB plug itself would be lower than the force needed to damage the cable) but I can’t argue that it makes the whole thing more convenient than models that need a separate cable to do anything.

iFi also supplies a USB-A and a Lightning adapter in the box and both of these have worked flawlessly in use. It’s hard to see this as anything other than a very well assembled and well specified little device. I’d hesitate to describe it as pretty but it’s not going to offend people and its small size means it’s incredibly easy to store when not in use.

Specification

• Twin ESS DACs
• Impressive sample rate and format support
• Able to run balanced
• Extremely powerful for its size

The GO Link Max, like most affordable digital to analogue convertors uses ESS for its decoding hardware. Unlike, most other devices, it uses an ESS model I’d never encountered before I tested the iFi.

This is the ES9219 Sabre which is designed specifically for use in compact portable applications and headsets. The reason why it’s been chosen is a built in feature that iFi Audio has implemented in the GO Link Max. Make an adjustment to the volume on the connected device and the GO Link Max can make its own adjustment to the volume rather than needing an attenuated or otherwise adjusted signal (it’ll still reflect the amended level on the connected device too).

I asked a little earlier why you might feel it worth spending £70 more on the iFi than you would on an Apple dongle that notionally does the same thing and the first answer is ‘sample rate.’ The iFi can handle PCM to 384kHz and DSD256 which are mind boggling numbers when you consider the price it’s being offered at and will cover the bulk of all music ever recorded.

The second is that there is more connectivity on the iFi. As there are two DAC’s in the chassis, it has the means to run fully balanced and has both a 3.5mm and 4.4mm output (separated by one of the thinnest dividers I’ve ever seen) on the end of it.

The 4.4mm ‘Pentacon’ connector has become a commonly encountered option on headphones and earphones in recent memory and this is one of the most affordable ways of creating a signal for it.

That signal has some welly behind it too. The company claims that the GO Link Max can deliver a maximum of 241mW of output which is impressive for something powered entirely over USB and a significant amount more than most off the shelf dongles can generate.

When using it with my MacBook as a Roon output, my volume setting has been 5 out of a possible 100. There aren’t many sanely priced headphones and earphones that the GO Link Max won’t drive to serious levels should you want it to.

Performance

• A massive jump over any wireless connection
• Plenty of real world power
• Quite absurdly good for £80

Running the GO Link Max with an iPad Pro and a pair of Sennheiser IE 600 headphone delivers a level of performance that can be hard to appreciate until you add some context.

The iFi is less than one sixth the price of the Sennheiser but, via the 4.4mm connection in particular, it never feels remotely out of place in the role. There is also not a single variation on a wireless setup you can rig with an external adapter that gets anywhere near the performance on offer here.

Running via Qobuz, and listening to Dodie’s Not For Lack of Trying, the performance of the GO Link Max has qualities that are simply absent over Bluetooth. Dodie as an artist uses silence to great effect in her work and these periods of silence are actually silent and this gives the actual musical sections far more dynamic impact.

Tonally, it’s a significant step forward too. That bandwidth that is shed for a signal to work wireless is tiny fragments of tonality and texture that, individually, make no difference. Getting them all back at once though is significant.

There is also no shortage of headroom on offer here either. Moving on from the Sennheiser to a pair of Focal Clear MG headphones makes this point in fine style. The Focal is more than fourteen times the price of the iFi and, while it’s not the hardest headphone to drive at the price, it’s still faintly impressive to see this tiny dongle successfully powering a full size pair of headphones.

In fact ‘powering’ rather undersells what is going on here. Listening to this combination pick their way through Fink’s Sunday Night Blues Club is something that is good enough for you to stop thinking about the equipment involved and start listening to the music as it’s being delivered. The quality of the bass on offer here in particular is genuinely outstanding; deep but packed with detail and definition that lifts the presentation into an actual performance.

The final demonstration of what is being offered here is when you stop using headphones and use the GO Link Max as an analogue out. I connected it via a 4.4mm to XLR cable into a Bryston Bi200 integrated amp (120 times the cost of the iFi; no really) and, still using the iPad as a source, the result was genuinely enjoyable. Can you get higher performance than this? Yes, you can (including from iFi themselves) but it’s still faintly remarkable what this device the size of a pack of gum can do.

Should you buy it?