The Eversolo Z10's cumbersome controls
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The large touchscreen display looks impressive. Whether the visualisations, the coloured LED around the volume knob and the choice of digital VU meters add value is taste. The option to turn it off is available in the DAC’s menu.
However, the ease of use of the DAC can be established in a more objective way: is it easy to select an input on the DAC.
Not so via the touch screen, which works just a little too cumbersome because there isn’t a ‘button’ immediately visible that you can select. You have to dive into a menu twice and that menu does not stay permanently once it is selected, the screen reverts back to a chosen home screen.
Neither does the Eversolo app, which works through a bluetooth link, because you have to grab a phone, open an app and only then can you choose an input. That’s already too many actions. But it is incomprehensible that the app then shows 11 (!) choices in the form of a symbol without a label. The symbol for HDMI Arc and I2S is the same and positioned next to each other.
The included remote is not the saving grace either, as it too has no clear buttons for each input. You can use the right-hand button at the top to scroll through the inputs and you have to look on the screen to observe which input is selected.
Pressing, holding and then turning the volume knob has the same effect, but several times it showed the standby and power-off menu instead of the input selection.
It is form over function on this Eversolo Z10. If you want to switch between a connected TV, streamer, a CD drive or a record player, you want to press a clearly identifiable button and nothing more. Whether that button is then physical, displayed on a touchscreen or on a remote control doesn’t matter. What matters is that you only want to perform one action and that action is right at your fingertips, without much thought.