DAC / AmpOverreview

Luxury & Precision W4

The best-measuring dongle of its day, argued over for its price, its voice and the word "self-developed".

24 sourcesUpdated
$449Typical US price

Score aggregates reviewer opinions across topics.

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Luxury & Precision W4

The short version

What to know.

A $449 bus-powered USB-C dongle with 3.5 mm and 4.4 mm outputs rated at 110 mW and 420 mW into 32 Ω, built around L&P's LP5108 package, with a click-wheel, a small OLED, two gain settings, five filters and a stack of EQ and IEM presets. Three things are close to unanimous. It is quiet — reviewers running notoriously hiss-prone in-ears describe a black background, and nobody in the set reports hiss from a healthy unit. It measures exceptionally well — about 119.5 dB SINAD on an Audio Precision bench, the highest that lab had recorded from a dongle. And it is generous with power for its size while drawing noticeably less from the phone than its predecessor. Two things are genuinely argued. Most listeners call its sound neutral and natural, but a sizeable minority hear the same presentation as dry, cool or occasionally bright. And the price splits the set almost down the middle: some say a class-leading product justifies it; others say the gain over cheaper dongles, or a real music player at the same money, does not. Early units also carried firmware teething troubles — pops on track changes, iPhone dropouts — that took about a year to settle.

About this product

The flagship W4, not the cheaper W4-EX launched alongside it: the EX uses the cut-down LP5108EX chip, is rated at 220 mW balanced instead of 420 mW and measures about 2 dB worse, though the menus and tuning options are the same. Not the later W4 ACG limited edition either. The W4 is a bus-powered USB-C dongle with 3.5 mm and 4.4 mm outputs, a single click-wheel for volume and menus, a small OLED, two gain settings, five digital filters, genre EQ presets, IEM-specific presets and two "Tune" voicings. The 3.5 mm jack doubles as an S/PDIF digital output; there is no dedicated analogue line out.

Luxury & Precision is best known for expensive digital audio players, and its W-series dongles are the company's way of putting that engineering on the end of a phone cable. The W4, launched in spring 2023 as the successor to the well-liked W2, was built around a chip L&P calls its own — the LP5108 — and sold at $449, which made it the most expensive mainstream dongle on the market when it arrived.

It landed the same month as Cayin's RU7, and the two were reviewed side by side for a year. The W4 was the one with the numbers: the highest SINAD L7 Audio Lab had measured from a dongle, with a dead-quiet output and unusually frugal power draw. It was also the one people argued about — over whether its chip was really in-house, whether its clean sound is neutral or simply cool, and whether any dongle is worth this much.

A good fit for

  • Owners of sensitive in-ears who want a silent background from a phone
  • Listeners who want a neutral, highly resolving source rather than a coloured one
  • Anyone who would rather carry a dongle than a second device, and wants the best-measuring one
  • People who like to tweak the voicing with presets, filters and Tune modes

Think twice if

  • You want a warm, lush or R2R-style sound — reviewers point to the Cayin RU7 instead
  • You need a true analogue line out, or a user-adjustable parametric EQ on the device
  • You only update firmware from a Mac or phone
  • Your in-ears are very low impedance and impedance-sensitive, where a lower-output-impedance source may suit better
  • The price of a digital audio player is hard to justify for a dongle

The reviewer consensus

Agreement &
disagreement.

2 / 7topics divide opinion
powernoisefeaturesergonomicsbuildtransparencyvalue
3 Strong agreement2 Mostly agree2 Divided opinions

Common ground6

  • Dead quiet: no hiss from a healthy unit, even with the most sensitive in-ears
  • Exceptional measurements — about 119.5 dB SINAD on an Audio Precision bench
  • Plenty of power for in-ears and most full-size headphones from a phone, especially balanced

Points of contention4

  • Whether its clean sound is neutral and natural or dry, cool and occasionally bright
  • Whether $449 is justified, or too much over cheaper dongles and similarly priced music players
  • Whether calling the LP5108 a "self-developed" chip is fair for a package reported to contain four Cirrus Logic DACs

A closer listen.

7 topics · 2 divided
Left: criticalRight: positiveTighter lines: more agreement

Power

PositiveStrong agreement
Reviewer sentiment13 supporting sources
CriticalNeutralPositive

Band: opinion spread · Dot: weighted average

Strong for the format and not seriously disputed. Reviewers drive hard in-ears and many full-size headphones from a phone, and two owners report reaching loud levels on demanding planars and the HD 800 S from the balanced output. The reservations are specific: the 3.5 mm output has no real advantage over cheaper dongles, the balanced output impedance of about 3 Ω is higher than some low-impedance multi-driver in-ears like, and the very hardest loads still want a desktop amp.

“Despite how hard MSE is to drive, W4 keeps up nicely at around 70/100 in high gain.”

Guy Lerner, The Headphone List

“you’ll be able to get 114 dB/SPL from the W4 into the HD800S”

Torq, forum.headphones.com

“it would be 9.6/10 on anything >40 ohm and 2/10 on my Andromeda, Ara, Variations, and Solis II”

BlueEmperor, Head-Fi, on the balanced output impedance

Measured

L&P rates the W4 at 110 mW (3.5 mm) and 420 mW (4.4 mm) into 32 Ω at under 0.01% THD+N. L7 Audio Lab measured 4.08 Vrms from the balanced output into an unloaded analyser input. ClieOS, an owner with a meter and a 47 Ω dummy load, measured a maximum of 0.68 V (about 59 mW) single-ended and 1.31 V (about 195 mW) balanced at high gain, and output impedance of 1.55 Ω single-ended and 3.14 Ω balanced — "not so high to be any real concern," in his words, but higher than he expected. L&P's own test on an iPhone's Lightning port (about 3.6 V) reached full volume, 2 Vrms into 32 Ω, while drawing 830 mW from the phone.

Link to this topic

The hardware

Specifications.

Checked

Design

Form factor
Dongle
DAC
LP5108
PCM
384 kHz / 32-bit
DSD
DSD256

Output

Output power
Single-ended: 110 mW @ 32 ΩBalanced: 420 mW @ 32 Ω
Gain settings
2
Signal-to-noise
134 dB

Connection

Digital inputs
USB-C
Headphone outputs
3.5 mm, 4.4 mm

Physical

Weight
24 g
Dimensions
63 × 24 × 12.5 mm

Manufacturer-published figures, not measurements · from audioessence.ch, oriolus.co.jp.

Follow the evidence

Sources 24

1–6 of 24 sources

Read with context

Limitations & method.

As of

What to keep in mind 5

  1. A read of where reviews and owners land as of October 2026. The W4 is now three years old, L&P has released newer W-series models and limited editions since, and the dongle field has caught up in places.

  2. Much of what early owners complained about — pops on track changes, iPhone dropouts, DSD glitches — was fixed by firmware over the following year, so older reviews can describe problems a current unit won't have. Updating still needs a Windows PC.

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