iFi GO Link 2 review after three months: three problems, one of them a hearing hazard
I bought the GO Link 2 to drive a HEDDphone D1 from a PC and a Pixel 10 Pro. On paper it's the right tool: around 1.6 V into 32 ohms, hardware volume, compact, and it sounds fine when it works. Mine spent most of its life plugged into a PC and barely moved. That's the good part of the review.
The headphone jack went loose within a few months. It started as the occasional dropout and progressed to losing contact every few steps when the phone is in my pocket, and sometimes needing a minute of pushing and rotating the plug to get sound back. Tested with other headphones: same behaviour. The D1 cable is fine on other outputs. So this is the socket, and it degraded under light use.
The second problem is the one that should be on the box. Roughly half the time I connect it to the Pixel 10 Pro with a music app already open (YouTube Music, Poweramp), it outputs full-scale white noise. Not a click - sustained, painfully loud static that doesn't stop until I kill the app and re-plug the dongle, sometimes several times. I now never put the headphones on before the dongle is connected and confirmed working. This isn't a Pixel 10 issue: the same symptom has been reported with the original GO Link on a Pixel 6, and the fix is the same ritual.
The third problem is subtler. Playing a loud tone followed by a quiet tone on one channel, the quiet tone starts noticeably attenuated and skips to its correct level after about half a second. It's reproducible with any headphones, and does not happen from a motherboard output. My best guess is iFi's "Dynamic Range Enhancement" gain-switching doing what it's designed to do, which means it isn't a defect, it's the product. For music you may never notice it. For anything that depends on accurate relative levels - test tones, calibration, by-ear EQ - it makes the device unusable.
I'm replacing it with a Cirrus CS43131 dongle (Fosi DS2 2024) rather than claiming the warranty, because a replacement unit would fix the socket and nothing else. If you only need a dongle for music on a phone that isn't a Pixel, the GO Link 2 is probably fine. If you're on a Pixel, or you need it to behave predictably with test signals, I'd pass.
