iFi Gryphon, Three Months On: The Portable DAC Built for Flights

The right DAC doesn’t just make music louder on a plane — it changes your relationship with the engine noise.

Three months of near-daily use, a good chunk of it at altitude, and the Gryphon has earned its place in the side pocket. It is beautifully built, compact enough to forget you are carrying it, and has the power to drive most of the IEMs I’d actually travel with. As a piece of hardware it is genuinely impressive.

The reason it matters on a flight, though, is the DSP. The X-Bass and X-Space functions are what set it apart: X-Bass thickens the low end enough to quiten the jet drone under the music — it doesn’t eliminate the engine, but it stops it dominating — and X-Space widens a stage that cheap gear collapses in a noisy cabin. On a long-haul sector those two switches are the difference between tolerating the noise and forgetting it.

What lets it down is everything around the sound. The Bluetooth is mediocre enough that you’ll give up and reach for the USB-C connector, which rather defeats the point of having it. And the interface is not intuitive — it takes a few sessions before the logic becomes second nature. Neither is a dealbreaker, but both are the kind of friction a product this good shouldn’t have.

The X-Bass and X-Space switches don’t silence the aircraft — they bury it under the music, which on a fourteen-hour flight is the next best thing.

The Testing Log

Roughly three months of use, a good share of it in flight, driving the IEMs in my rotation over the USB-C connector into a phone and an iPad. Battery held up to about seven hours of real listening between charges. Tested the two things that matter in a cabin: whether it could make engine noise recede (X-Bass does, decently) and whether it could last a long-haul sector (it can).

The Competition

It’s a clear step up from the iFi hip-dac — more power, more control, better on a plane. The honest gap in this review is the wider field: iFi has already released a newer, more powerful model (which I’ve bought and am moving to), and I haven’t yet run the Gryphon head-to-head against other similarly priced DACs, so I can’t tell you where it lands against them.

What Would Change the Score

Bluetooth that you’d actually use, and a more intuitive interface, would push this into the 90s on their own. A head-to-head against similarly priced rivals could move Value in either direction — that’s the test I still owe it.