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This is a review and measurements of the iBasso DX200 Digital Audio Player (DAP). It is on kind loan from a member who has been waiting a while for its review. I see on Amazon that DX200 costs US $1,199 but Amazon is selling it for US $799 including free shipping. Either way, it is the price of a smartphone!The DX200 is quite a bit larger, thicker and heavier than a phone though:The DX200 runs Android OS and has a responsive touchscreen. Not as fast as a modern smartphone but quite a bit faster than some other cheaper DAPs.The volume control has no acceleration and has 150 steps making it very tedious to make large volume changes.When a DAP supports a DAC mode using a USB cable, I try to test its DAC that way since my analyzer can be fully in charge allowing me to run all the tests I want. Alas, that was not meant to be. I killed at least 3 hours trying to figure out how to enable this. The manual says to pull down the settings menu in Android. I did that. There is an audio settings menu but that says nothing about DAC mode.Next I tried to download drivers. The support page is an unorganized mess of zip files for everything they make and multiple versions. I clicked on a driver package which installed but did nothing. Digging into driver settings I realized it was unsigned so Windows had refused to use it.I thought the firmware was too old. Downloaded a nearly 700 megabyte package only to be told in an ominous warning that I better upgrade to Android 8 first or else. Why is that my job and why is it not part of what I just downloaded???Searched again and found another more recent driver package that had "signed" in its name. Upon running setup, Windows 10 warned me the driver was not signed! What the heck? With nervous fingers I told it to ignore and keep going. Still nothing. Windows would not see a sound device.By chance, I swiped my finger left and right and then I saw a set of tiles, one of which was to select the DAC mode. Even there, I did not know what "DAC ON" meant. Did it mean if I clicked on that the DAC would turn on? Or that it was already on? Turned out to be the latter.Once there, Windows recognized the device as a DAC and I got all excited! That didn't last long after I realized I could not get any output out of the device across any of its ports.The documentation talks about Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) which as an aside, my team developed while I was at Microsoft. Again, no sign of how to get the device into that mode. If this device were mine, by now I would be throwing it out the window!So there I go searching for an unused micro-SD card (all my existing ones have Raspberry Pi images on them). Found one and transferred a couple of my test files to it. That worked and as a result, those are the only measurements you see.Here is our usual dashboard with the 24-bit 1 kHz tone playing from local micro-SD card:This is from 3.5 mm headphone out at max volume. Performance was almost identical with Line out. I was disappointed with such a low output level. With such a beefy device I expected a lot more output and hence power.Good news is that distortion and noise are quite low for a portable device, landing the DX200 into our second tier of all DACs tested regardless of type and price:The output power nearly matches the specifications. This means you can use it to compute the power output using V^2/R. So for 300 ohm headphone you have just 8.5 milliwatts output. That is no better than a little dongle you can buy. Power increases using balance to 34 milliwatts which is not bad.Jitter test shows a couple of spurious tones that should not be there:But their levels are below -120 dB so definitely not audible.The baseline system runs fine here courtesy of Android and responsive touchscreen. I did not use the device with large number of music files to see how easy it is to navigate. You can find other reviews for that. As you can tell from my intro, the setup and documentation is quite lacking. Company should hire someone in US to improve these things for them. There is no excuse for an electronic manual to be out of date. Or have tons of files thrown in a directory without due organization.At these sky high prices, you may be better off getting a used LG phone instead of DX200. It will be tons lighter and easier to setup. Then again it also has its own quirks when it comes to how much power it produces.Anyway, the core audio performance of DX200 seems quite good based on limited testing. So if that is an important criteria, and you have the cable to run your headphone using balanced, I don't see a concern with its performance. It simply is not for me so I can't recommend it.------------As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.Just bought a new faster PC to speed up my workflow and deal with piggy software people write these days.I am happy with the PC but am very depressed over spending $1,200. Need a fast and good infusion of cash to be happy again. So pleasemoney using : https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/