Silverstone Ensemble EB01-E DAC, EB03 Amplifier Review

Setting up the EB01-E is a fairly simple task. The drivers can either be installed directly from the included CD or can be downloaded from the Silverstone website. We would recommend the latter as it ensures that the most up-to-date version is being installed. The manual also suggest we tweak a few audio settings once the driver has been installed for optimum results.

Connecting up the two devices is fairly simple and all the necessary cables are provided. We connected the EB01-E to our computer via the supplied USB cable, and the EB03 to the EB01-E using the supplied RCA cable. We tested the EB01-E and EB03 with two pairs of headphones, the Sennheiser G4ME One and the SteelSeries Siberia V2.

We commenced our testing with the EB01-E on its own, connecting our headphones via the RCA to 3.5mm (male) adapter. There was a noticeable improvement in sound quality when using the EB01-E, especially in terms of detail and clarity. This was more noticeable with the cheaper SteelSeries Siberia V2 headphones. While there was no distortion at higher volumes, we found the volume levels to be lacking themselves so decided to hook up the EB03 amplifier and see how performance compared.

There was another noticeable improvement in sound quality when adding the EB03 into the mix. We tested the devices with both high quality FLAC audio files and lower quality MP3s across both pairs of headphones.

When comparing with our computers onboard audio, we found that there were more significant improvements in quality with the inferior SteelSeries headphones than the Sennheisers. Similarly, there was a greater improvement in quality with both sets of headphones when playing lower quality MP3 tracks.

We found the neutral sound balance to be favourable to all types of music that we tried. The EB03 can facilitate ridiculous volume levels should you get too ambitious with the volume control which we couldn’t even push to 50% without it being far too loud. Perhaps even more impressive than the sheer volume levels achievable with this combination is the lack of any distortion at any volume level.

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