Dossier — Kiwi Ears Allegro Mini

Kiwi Ears rates the Allegro Mini at PCM 32-bit / 384 kHz, and the descriptor meets it — native 16-, 24-, and 32-bit containers carrying the full ladder to 384 kHz on a high-speed USB Audio Class 2 interface. Red Book material plays at its own 16-bit depth; nothing is forced up into a wider container to flatter the spec.

On DSD, the marketing names DSD64 and DSD128 without saying how they arrive. An unqualified DSD claim is weighed as a claim of native DSD — the most specific reading of the words the vendor chose — and against that reading the descriptor falls short: not one witnessed alt-setting carries a native one-bit stream. On a modern bridge of this class, which declares a native DSD path in its descriptor when it has one, that absence is the finding. DSD may still reach the converter over the DSD-over-PCM (DoP) transport, riding the PCM stream at marker rates — but DoP is not a capability the descriptor can witness, and it is not what a bare "DSD128" implies. The headline reads native; the silicon declares none.

A note on the keying. The USB identity here is a shared bridge marque, not a mark unique to Kiwi Ears — the host announced only the generic platform string "CDS.KT USB Audio," the signature of a KTMicro bridge that carries other budget dongles as well. The Concordance keys by what the descriptor declares; here the descriptor declared the shared bridge, and the witnessing named the rest.