It’s USB DAC with a Sold-State AMP using a tube as buffer.
Zeos’ review:
It is ,sadly, a great great unit with a poor dac.
The amp, it’s loud and I mean, LOUD. I don’t even know why it has three gains. You can basically use any headphones with this.
Something funny about Zeos’ video is @18:18 when he’s comparing 789 with the amp, and he says 600 likes tube more than SS, while T1SE is a ss amp with a tube-buffered dac. So yeah Z, replace your whole 789s with T1SE, at least while using 600 and NDH20 lol.
Tube buffer section is way more capable that what it seems. It can obviously handle all 6922s pretty well but that’s not the only tube type you can use with this.
User lwrs10 @head-fi confirmed that the heater circuit of the tube section can handle 3 amps.
This allows you to use other tube types like 6H30PI which uses much higher current, and many 6922 heater circuit can’t handle that much. But this unit can.
There are many different tubes you can use with this, either by using adapter (like 6SN7) or without any adapter like 6H30PI, which is commonly referred to as the “Supertube” by Balanced Audio Technology.
DAC however, well it’s only capable of 24bit/192khz and DSD64, which isn’t impressing.
If only I could stack it with soemthing like Aune X8 as dac, it would be my dream unit but that way I can’t use the tube. So I have to live with the meh dac.
Yeah, this review made me cringe quite a bit, especially when he says stuff like: “I think for the stock tube with the line input, that’s how this sounds the best.” Since the Aune T1se is a tube DAC with a solid-state amp section, the tube is doing nothing when you use line input. If you use the line input with the T1se, thereby bypassing the tube altogether, it defeats the purpose of using this product.
I’ve been following Zeos since he was at ~40K subscribers and I’ve been donating to his Patreon for twenty consecutive months, but there are times when I really wish he would do at least a little bit of research before diving into a review only to publish it with rudimentary factual errors. I mean, it literally says “tube DAC” right on the unit.
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For people who have compressed sound problem, burn in the tube. I can confirm after 2 months, the stock tube sounds wide and deep. The tube needs roughly 200 hours to open up.
Or you can buy a NOS tube which is what most people do.