Posted by Pros: Almost entirely uncoloured transparent output
1 Watt
Nice form factor and construction
Cons: No controls for anything
Can warm your house in a pinch
The legend of Prometheus is one fantastic story of the titan who defied Zeus and gave fire to the humans. He also ended up being chained to a rock where an eagle would eat his liver all day and it would grow back in the night, leading some people to believe that the ancients perhaps knew that hepatocytes are one of the few solid organ cells in the body that actually can regenerate. The Fangsound Prometheus shares a couple of common traits with this story – one is to show humans the light, the other I’ll get to eventually.
I thank Fangsound and Audio Geek India for letting me review this little genie in a bottle and as always my thoughts are my own.
Fangsound is a super interesting company that makes ridiculously high powered dacs and amps and the Prometheus is one of the two portable dongle style dacs that they have. Its little sibling the Nereus Mini is less than a third the cost and half the power and both are currently available on Linsoul.
The unboxing is fairly standard. A cardboard box with the dac nestled in foam with a nice c-to-c cable. The DAC itself is a little cnc aluminum milled biscuit, apparently held together by 2 hex screws. The top face has “prometheus” etched on to it in greek letters, the back has the Fangsound logo and a declaration that the ESS9039PRO resides in this device. The shorter sides have a Usb-C port and 3.5 and 4.4 headphone ports. The longer sides have a diagonal pattern etched on to them which make for a nice grip till they start dissipating the heat.
The guts of the device is made of the ESS9039PRO chip that can toss out a dynamic range of 129dB and a power of 1W. Yes a whole 1000 mW at 32 Ohms and that’s 6Vrms. What this basically means is four things
- The first is that this is stupidly loud, which means please check the source volume before playing. The Macs tend to automatically push to max volume on connecting almost any DAC,
- The second is that the ESS chip is very very clean so most of the characteristics of the sound are going to be dependent on what IEM or headphone is connected to it,
- Third, this gets really warm over time, I would use it to heat my house in winter, crack an egg on it if it was larger or use it as a coffee warmer at my desk,
- Fourth, this could have done with inline volume controls.
The ESS chip does its job really well. There’s almost no colouration of the music. Just a lot of power delivered with absolutely no distortion. Bass is controlled punchy with great texture and no bleed or bloat. Sub-bass is weighty and makes its presence felt but is not overpowering. The mid-bass is punchy and has perfect decay and kicks and bass guitars are meaty enough to keep the groove well felt but not bloated or lingering.
Male and female vocals and instruments like guitars, horns, synths are clear and clean with natural timbre and no distortion and are not pushed or recessed and basically represented as mastered. The mids are where they are supposed to be. They are the meat of any song and are given their fair importance. The keyword being fair.
And from fair to air – the treble has the same treatment as the mids. Clean, clear and representing all the details, leaving no notes behind or unheard. There’s no sibilance and a neutral IEM like the Kima 2 or reference headphones like the R70xa are a joy to listen to on this DAC.
The VE stack is probably the cleanest dac I’ve heard and this one probably has a slightly warmer tone than the VE Prime DAC. It is however just about as warm as the Devastator Pro Max.
It can comfortably drive the HD600 and the R70xa but both felt like they would draw a little more power. Which I had to disallow due to a possible heat hazard. It is more than sufficient for almost all the IEMs I have, though I do have ones that are mostly fairly easy to drive. This with the VE ZhuanXu would be interesting for sure. And a very unfair comparison with the Galvatron would be a fun session.
Barring the heating and the lack of volume buttons and well a slightly prohibitive cost in a world of very efficient dacs, this is a very very good and very very powerful DAC which is well worth it for a specific use case of driving really greedy gear in a space constrained environment with adequate cooling technology.
No, jokes apart, it sounds amazing and is really powerful and extremely clean despite the power. It is a 9 on 10.