Compared to the difference we heard last year, the TFA9895 is a subtle beast. It's not designed to push voltage further, but to improve sound quality regardless of how much total power is sent to the speaker. It does this by applying feedback to different frequency bands separately, so that parts of the audio that risk causing distortion can be dampened down without suppressing speaker output as a whole. If the vocals in a track suddenly get loud, for instance, they can be controlled on their own, without the backing instruments also having to get quieter -- in other words, different elements in the track don't sound like they're competing against each other.

And yes, listening to a demo board with stereo 5V speakers, we could hear the difference. In some casual blind tests, we managed to identify the improved device three out of four times -- with the one failed test being Avril Lavigne's Sk8er Boi song about a boy who skates, which is already a heavily compressed track where most frequencies have the same volume. We were left with the feeling that this chip will be extremely useful for watching TV and movies, where separation of different strands of the soundtrack is crucial to the experience, so bring on 2014.