Dossier — Zorloo Ztella

Zorloo publishes a partial hand: a sample rate with no bit depth, a DSD ceiling with no transport, and an MQA badge that lives above the wire. The descriptor supplies what the marketing withholds.

On PCM, the vendor states only "up to 384 kHz" — no bit depth appears anywhere on the page. The silicon fills the gap the copy leaves: native 16-, 24-, and 32-bit containers, each carrying the full ladder to 384 kHz on a high-speed USB Audio Class 2 interface. What Zorloo would not put in a number, the descriptor declares outright. Because the marketed claim names a rate but no depth, it is left unscored — an incomplete claim earns no verdict — and the witnessed alt-settings stand in its place as the fuller record.

On DSD, the marketing names 5.6 MHz — DSD128 — without saying how it arrives. An unqualified DSD claim is weighed as a claim of native DSD, and against that reading the descriptor falls short: not one witnessed alt-setting carries a native one-bit stream. On a modern USB dongle of this class — the kind that declares a native DSD path in its descriptor when it offers one — that absence is the finding. DSD128 may still reach the converter over the DSD-over-PCM (DoP) transport, riding the 352.8 kHz PCM rung the descriptor does declare; but DoP is not a capability the descriptor can witness, and it is not what a bare "5.6 MHz" implies. The headline reads native; the silicon declares none.

Two versions ship under one name. The MQA version pairs an ESS Sabre ES9281C PRO with a 2nd-unfold MQA renderer; the Standard version carries an ES9270C and drops MQA. Both are marketed at the same PCM and DSD ceilings, and the USB identity they present is the same — so the witnessed descriptor cannot say which of the two a listener offered. MQA itself is a software render that unfolds above the wire; the descriptor is blind to it, on either version.