Hifiman Serenade – Current, Color, Composure: A Serenade Story
Hifimans latest Himalaya powered Wireless Desktop DAC/Amplifier/Pre-Amp, the Goldenwave Serenade Wireless DAC was a very welcome release following on from the success of the EF range. So the earphonia.com team had to contain their excitement at the opportunity to experiencing this sleek black gem.Â
Hifiman Serenade Wireless Review
$999.00
Serenade Wireless Dac
Smooth Musical Neutral, With a Pulse. Class-A Calm, R-2R Color
I didn’t expect to like it this much. I thought I knew the shape of this hobby—how first impressions bloom, how the novelty fades, how a favorite box becomes another black rectangle under the light—but the Serenade arrived with a kind of quiet conviction that I only recognize in hindsight. You lift it out of the foam and it doesn’t wink or shout or preen. It’s substantial in the hands—close to four kilos, a slab of well-finished metal with softened edges—and you can feel the dignity of mass, the stillness of it.
It isn’t handsome in a showroom way; it’s handsome the way a well-made plane is handsome, or a kitchen knife that’s been sharpened for years but never fussed over. The front is almost reserved: a legible display that tells you exactly what’s going on—format, sample rate, input, output—without purple flourish. The recessed top edge exposes three round buttons—INPUT, SELECT, OUTPUT—that click with a low, clean certainty. It feels like a promise kept before you even feed it a song.
Push your thumb across the volume: smooth travel, no chatter, no wiggle. Ports are exactly where you want them when you’re in a hurry and too lost in a record to think: 4-pin XLR and 4.4mm balanced for the headphones that deserve it, 6.35mm single-ended for the ones that don’t mind, XLR and RCA out back to slip into a speaker chain or a recording loop. And then the quietly practical decision that feels like a love note to anyone who’s ever rebuilt a system at midnight: a line-level RCA input.
You can bypass the converter entirely and use the amplifier alone. In practice, this means you can indulge a phono stage with real bite, or a vintage DAC you can’t bear to shelve, or a friend’s curious digital box that shows up unannounced. That generosity of roles—DAC/amp, preamp, network endpoint—feels less like feature creep and more like respect for the way people actually listen.
