Lory Hawley of HomeTheaterHifi.com found her Colibri at the end of a long second day at CanJam SoCal 2023. She showed EarMen's Miroslav Milovanović her AudioQuest Dragonfly, and he handed her a small black rectangle. Colibri means hummingbird, he told her later, and he joked that it got the name because hummingbirds eat dragonflies. EarMen builds small DACs and headphone amplifiers that punch well above their size, and the trick behind most of them is a balanced output. An ordinary headphone jack gives each earpiece one amplifier, while a balanced jack gives it two working together, which is why EarMen's balanced outputs deliver several times the power of their standard ones. EarMen uses the compact 4.4mm balanced plug even on its desktop gear. Paweł Szachno of Ear Fidelity says the brand has a house sound, and he calls the CH-Amp "a neutral tuning with a hint of natural warmth." EarMen suits listeners who want real power from a small box.

If you mostly use earphones with a phone, start with the Eagle, a simple dongle. Lachlan of Passion for Sound heard more ease and a better sense of layering from it than from AudioQuest's Dragonfly Red. For full-size headphones on the go, the Colibri is the better pick, because it carries its own battery and takes the load off your phone. To get the most from either, use headphones with a 4.4mm balanced cable. On a desk, the ST-Amp combines a DAC and amp, and a switch turns off its DAC so it becomes a plain amplifier. Aldous of Headfonics heard a "jump in clarity and resolution" that way, which makes it an amp to keep if you later add a separate DAC. The top step is the Tradutto DAC with the CH-Amp. Szachno suggests ordering a 4.4mm cable to link the two. The CH-Amp can also run a pair of active speakers and mutes them when you plug in headphones.

Milomir Trosic came to EarMen from building high-end tube amplifiers. Hawley writes that he wanted to reach a larger audience with portable DAC/amps, so he designed the EarMen products himself and based the company in Chicago. The products are made in Europe. The first two were the TR-Amp and the Sparrow. The Sparrow took aim at AudioQuest's DragonFly series, and Headfonia explained the name with "Because Sparrows eat…", a running joke the Colibri later picked up. The Tradutto DAC brought the awards. Ear Fidelity named it Best DAC 2021, Mono & Stereo gave it a 2022 Best Buy award, and Jay Garrett of StereoNET swapped it in for his Chord Qutest and called it "a skilled and compact DAC." Szachno first heard the stack at the Munich High End show in 2022 with Meze Elite headphones, and he says the sound completely blew him away. Paul Cash of HiFi Trends heard the CH-Amp and Tradutto present music so cleanly that "the headphones and components just got out of the way." EarMen now makes portable and desktop gear side by side, and Ear Fidelity calls the stack EISA award-winning.