With the standalone iematch, my experience has been generally positive, on ultra mode there’s not really that noticeable of a sq hit with most midrange to entry higher end gear, but once you get up there it can become noticeable enough to want to remove it (although if you have that nice of transducers you should be running them on sources that don’t need an iematch in the first place). It will likely do it’s job without much deterioration of sound. I’d assume it’s implemented similarly in the gryphon but no clue since I don’t have personal experience with it, but I bet background hiss would be a non issue on that unit
I feel you there lol. For my portable setups I typically run a luxury and precision p6 pro → mass kobo 424 or woo wa8 (in the past a bakoon hpa-21, wish I didn’t sell that lol) and it’s pretty great for being “portable” but it’s absolutely not convenient nor small, but hey the sound is what matters
Speaking of, you could look into portable amp only units and hook them up to a portable dac for a portable stack (as an example a vorzuge vorzamp duo ii is a standalone portable amp with a great bass boost), but that’s going to be more size and likely more expensive than an aio solution all in
You technically could just grab a DAP with a built in eq and use it as a usb dac/amp, but if you are buying a dap and aren’t going to use the player aspect of it, it’s not the best value to do (a dap with real solid eq and a very black background around/under 1k is the lotoo paw 6000 or hiby rs6, under 500 I’d look for an ibasso dx160 if they still sell them)
Gotcha, then you shouldn’t have many problems then.