Finally the long awaited Pink Faun Ultra USB bridge is complete and just about to be delivered to their first owners next week.
Last year 2023 when I found out about it, I visited Pink Faun in Rhenen to have a first look and wrote up about that visit is
here. Being a long time Pink Faun user, I am fortunate to be in this first pre-production batch of 10 units.
It’s taken a little longer than planned but the team has taken the time to revise the locking lip of the USB Ultra’s aluminium case so it can fit both the current 2.16 Ultra streamer, which was what it was designed for, and the older 2.16x cases where full height cards usually needs some adjustment to fit. The Ultra card is 1.5x the width of a PCIe slot due to the new case which serves as an EMI shield and heat sink for the new super-capacitor power components and Ultra OCXO clock inside and so it will need 2 free full sized PCIe slots to fit. External power will be 5V/2A through what will probably be a 2.5mm barrel plug but there seems to also be an internal 4-pin Molex power socket too. It will be interesting to compare the internal Molex supply buffered by the super capacitors to a good external DC supply. This is significant since good DC supplies and their associated audiophile cables are not cheap.
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Jord informs me that the card will be officially launched on their website before the Munich show in May. The 2nd batch is sold out with units ready later this month and production of the 3rd batch is on the way. I’m told the current plan is to sell only to existing Pink Faun owners for €3250 ex. VAT making this probably the highest price USB card in existence!
Once I get my unit and have sometime with it, I will write my impressions about how it sounds. At this price, it is not a trivial purchase and it would have to out perform the existing v2 card substantially to make it worth the asking price. I recently found that the existing v2 card already
outperformed the older v1/ultraOCXO card so this will be a difficult target to reach indeed. Let’s see soon!
Regards to all, Kin