HiFiMAN HM-801 Portable Player / DAC Review: Part One of Two - Page 4

Yea If I'm going to pay that much I should be able to adjust the audio to my liking. This is the digital realm it's not like we'd want a mechanical analog EQ soldered to the board or anything.

High end hardware should not mean NO OPTIONS, why can't we have high end hardware and options to?

i also posed the question in the preorder thread, but why don't ya use the pcm1704u-k chip?...no modification would be needed...has tighter specs...

At that point you are probably better off concatenating those movements into one file.

I hope you don't have a massive collection to do.

If they are Flac + cue the work is already done for you.

Obviously this sort of thing isn't for you.

when you go to Britney Spears concert, you cant ask her to equalize something. similarly, you cant ask Picasso to add some green color to his paintings that you like with photoshop. IMO

No, but you can change your glasses to suit your eyesight

This appears to be the perfect player apart from one important limitation which appears to have been overlooked, and that is memory capacity. The current maximum size available for SDHC cards is 32gb, when considering the file size of lossless audio this makes it inpractical to have to constantly buy multiple cards to store music on. Not to mention remembering what files you have on what cards.

Maybe future development will allow for support of SDXC cards when they become main stream and affordable. Then this player will definately be a must buy, and replacement for my kenwood hd60GD9.

This looks very exciting! I am thrilled and hopeful. But I agree that no EQ is a better option.

Why do you say that? My home stereo costs well over 20,000$ and my $5000 Lexicon MC-8 processor still has some basic tone controls. I have over 1000$ invested in my current portable rig and still have EQ presets I use.

There is no reason High end equipment should be stripped of all audio options especially when in the digital realm it would not impact sound quality if they are not used.

High-end audio should not mean "no options", these two things are not mutually exclusive

If having an EQ doesn't degrade the SQ when it is turned off why would people not want it to be there at all? If you don't want to use it you simply would not use it and pretend it is not there. But not having the option to adjust the audio at all really limits it's usefulness for alot of people.

+1 for Rockbox.
Working with the Rockbox developers to get Rockbox on it would be awesome. With its wide audio codec/container support, and much more.

I have a feeling the UI / lack of gapless etc might kill this product.

It would be very easy preventing all these dilemmas, and it wouldn't cost a dime in licensing fees with Rockbox ported on the player.

You payed $1,000 for a Zune 30gb, a low end portable amp and a low end earphone? Wow, rip off anyone?

That's what I was thinking too. Will there be 64GB SDHC cards, or is that type of card limited to 32? If so, I'll definitely wait for V.2 that can make use of a 2 TB SDXC card.