multimedia gear

Xitel HiFi-Link

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By Joel Shore

September 5, 2002

So you’re sitting in the dorm room cramming for that dreaded math exam. The stereo, with its scads of power and giant bass-rattling speakers, is blasting over in that corner. But you’re sitting in this corner playing your PC’s entire library of MP3 files through your Walkman headphones, or worse, those tiny, tinny speakers built into your laptop PC. You just know there’s gotta be a better way.

That’s when your brain cells hit on a brilliant idea: Why can’t I play the music that’s on my PC through my stereo system? Well, genius, you can. Enter the HiFi-Link from Xitel.

This is one of the simpler, and more elegant products you’ll come across this—or any other—year. Barely longer than 3 inches and weighing all of two ounces, this little silver-colored device converts your digital audio files into a high-quality audio signal that your stereo system can understand. Best of all, it completely bypasses that miserable-sounding audio card that you had no choice but to take when you bought that PC in the first place. It’s so cool, they ought to paint it icy blue instead of silver.

The HiFi-Link works with any audio file, including MP3, WMA, WAV, Real, Liquid, MIDI, Internet radio, and anything else you can throw at it. And it doesn’t care what application you use to play those files. Windows Media Player, Winamp, RealAudio Player, LiquidAudio Player, MusicMatch Jukebox, iTunes, LimeWire, Napster (R.I.P.), Cakewalk, Finale, and all the others will do just fine, thank you.

Skip the card. If you wanted to play your MP3 files through your stereo system in the past, you had two solutions. First, you could burn a CD and hope your stereo’s CD player knew what an MP3 file was. The other method was to hook up a cable that you most likely plugged into the “line out” jack of your sound card (if you had one) or into your computer’s headphone jack. That’s a pretty crummy solution, because even a good computer sound card is decidedly mediocre at best when it comes to delivering true audiophile high fidelity. Distortion, dull treble, muffled bass, tinny midrange, and that annoying hum are typical of many audio cards. You were wondering if there was a better way. Yep, there’s a better way.

Because the HiFi-Link is a USB device, the digital signal never gets routed through your computer’s sound card. Instead, the signal goes through the main system bus where it’s directed to the appropriate USB port, in exactly the same way your word processor sends that term paper of yours to a printer. Whether it’s Nine Inch Nails or an analysis of Twelfth Night, the file you are processing is nothing more than a long stream of ones and zeros to your computer. A specially designed DAC chip (digital-to-analog converter) in the HiFi-Link does its magic and sends a high-quality, nearly distortion-free analog signal to your stereo.

Easy set-up. No product will ever be easier to install than the HiFi-Link. First, you connect the unit to your stereo system. The included 30’ cable has a standard 1⁄8" pin plug at one end, and a pair of gold-plated RCA plugs at the other end. You can plug the RCA plugs into any available line or auxiliary input on your stereo. Second, you connect the HiFi-Link to your computer with the included USB cable. That’s it! There’s no power supply to plug in. And best of all, there’s no software to install. In fact, the product does not even include a software CD-ROM. Your PC or Macintosh should find the HiFi-Link automatically and install the appropriate driver. It’s as plug-and-play as you can get. Wouldn’t it be nice if all products installed this easily?

The unit has four tiny rubber feet; obviously, the makers think it’s going to sit atop a desk, amplifier, or speaker cabinet. That’s not likely to happen. What’s more likely is that the HiFi-Link will be suspended by it’s cables over a bookcase or stuffed somewhere out of sight behind a desk. So what we did was to loop both the USB and stereo cables once around the unit, protecting them from being accidentally pulled out by securing them with a rubber band.

The HiFi-Link may be most at home in a college dorm or apartment where computer and stereo are within 30 feet of each other. In a single family residence, where computer and stereo are likely to be located in different rooms, the HiFi-Link may not be so quickly adopted. That’s a small inconvenience.

Bottom line? Xitel’s HiFi-Link is so cool, so affordable, and sounds so good, every music-pumping, eardrum-shattering college dorm-room stereo should be equipped with one. Don’t leave home without it.<