This is a review and detailed measurements of the JDS Labs Element II DAC and headphone amplifier. It was kindly sent to me by JDS Labs. The Element II costs US $399 and is a marriage of the JDS EL DAC II ($299) and EL AMP II ($249). So you save good amount of money by purchasing the combination.From the outside, the Element II looks just like the EL AMP II which is a good thing:The same marquee volume control adorns the Element II as it did with EL AMP II. The back side is a combo of the two products:You lose the coax and s/pdif digital inputs which the EL DAC II has.The gain button does what you imagine. The power button has double function where you hold it to change modes from RCA in the back and headphone in the front. I did turn the unit off and on by accident trying to change mode. This, combined with it being in the back, causes some usability issue. As is lack of a digital display indicating what is playing.But oh, that volume control!I made a couple of measurements to assure that the heart of the DAC II lives inside the Element II and that is the case:So let's move on to the headphone output starting with power into 300 ohm load:It is clear we are bound by the performance of the DAC which is lower than my reference Topping DX3 Pro. Noise level is clearly higher. The AMP II though comes through with higher power than the DX3 Pro.Switching to 33 ohm load emphasizes the amplifier more, allowing the Element II to do better at max power:Testing for noise level that might be there with sensitive IEMs at 50 millivolts output we get:Clearly the DAC is pulling the unit back as the AMP II did much better.Channel balance was much worse than AMP II for some reason (may be due to this test being in high gain):Output impedance was comfortably low:While measurements often were dominated by the performance of the DAC, that did not translate into lack of performance subjectively. Here, the amplifier was front and center providing exceptional fidelity with my low impedance/inefficient (Drop Ether CX) or high impedance (Seenheiser HD-650). There was thundering amount of power with ample headroom -- something I don't get with Topping DX3 Pro. This shows that the headphone amplifier is always more important than the DAC.There marriage here is comprised of a very good DAC with a superb headphone amplifier. When measuring the former, of course we miss the mark of state-of-the-art performance. The amplifier though is king. No doubt about it. As is the nice and unique packaging. Subjectively it is all you want in a desktop product to drive headphones. Yes, deep inside you will know that you could have had a better DAC if you used such externally.But in listening, it won't matter and you will have a less cluttered desk.I am going put theon my recommended list.--------As always, questions, comments, corrections, etc. are welcome.Thanksgiving holiday is coming in US soon. I had to buy turkey to make dinner not only for us, but also for a bunch of hungry panthers. Seeing how they demanded it be organic which cost three times as much, I am broke! Or at least feel that way. So pleaseto get me out of that funk using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/