Woo Audio, purveyor of fine tubed gear for the discerning head-fi’er, have finalized their portable — the WA8 Eclipse ($1,619 Black or Sliver, $1,709 Gold — but note that these are intro prices, which will jump in April!).
The Eclipse runs three tubes (two 6S31B, one 6021) via a lithium battery, but a switch allows you to select the two/three tube path to tweak the signature for IEMs or other headphones. Think: quieter | more/less lush.
The DAC section features a ES9018K2M chip, and is fully compliant with 24bit/384kHz file resolution. There are outputs for 1/4″ and 1/8″.
Battery life is about 4 hours, unfortunately. That’s a lot of fire and decoder to support, so expect to need backup or access to a plug for those long flights. Given the robustness of the enclosure — it’s hefty quite solid in the hand — I’m guessing that this is targeted more at the transportable than truly portable, though I suppose “fire in your pocket” is still totally do-able. Think of it as an ultra-compact Fireflys.
Brian Hunter of Audio-Head has a nice unboxing vid you can catch, here:
Also in the room was the monster of headphones, the Abyss AB-1266 (review here), hanging off a pair of WA5LE v2 headphone amplifiers (review here). This was a dead-sexy combo, all power and grace, and a must-hear for the desktop dominant. Tour-de-force sound quality here.
