HiFiMAN HM-801 Portable Player / DAC Review: Part One of Two - Page 5

Lack of gapless and lack of storage did for me, sadly. I would've been all over this, otherwise.

Looks like Pretec is the first to sell 32 and 64GB SDXC cards. With no compatible devices available yet, it would have been a HUGE coup to already be compatible. Small company I suppose might not yet have access to that technology?

Yes 32gb is the current maximum for SDHC cards, in my opinion developers will most likely stop looking for ways to increase the size of SDHC cards and more likely try and find ways to make the manufacturing costs of SDXC cards cheaper resulting in mass production and a lower consumer price.

Secure Digital card - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Whatever that means... pretty sure SDXC is taking SDHC's place in the near future.

battery life seems to be too short also.

What would be really cool is if it could read usb drives that are connected to it. This way if you wanted a bigger collection you could hook up an external drive to it without needing a full computer.

What would be interesting is having it support a "smart bay" like system. Where you can get volume if you have a portable amp in the smart bay but you could take that out and put a HDD there and then use an external amp from the 3.5 line out. Just an idea but this thing looks pretty cool, it is just that personally I would rather have something that allows for large integrated storage support with a great DAC rather than a portable amp that could always be attached to the outside.

cool ideas; but I rather think they are beyond the development/brainstoring stage

no development/brainstorming needed to replace the 1704 chip with the 1704u-k hehe...

i wonder if it's easily accessible...then i could just desolder it & put in the new chip myself...anyways, like i said, interesting product regardless...

Yes, it can be used as a DAC, the quality is alright.

Still wondering how does it compare with D50, both as DAP and DAC

Price?

The introductory price is $600, regularly $700.

Source

Sorry, I've only read the first post, and skimmed the preorder page, as well as the head-direct page. I'm a bit confused about the product here...

I noticed that there's no mention of digital audio output. Only input... I also noticed that it only accepts SD card memory (as a "last ditch" or "just in case"), which isn't a lot of space for music... This brings me to believe that one is supposed to have a separate source to feed the digital information into the "HifiMAN HM-801". So, I'm guessing that this device is primarily a portable DAC?

I guess that the concept is there is no need of another DAC, so there is no digi out. The SD card on the other hand will support up to 128Gb, so I think the storage space is not a big issue. With a amp module this must be a DAP isn't it?

Whoops, heh, I forgot about the amp part I must have been thinking that people would use a separate amp anyway...

$600! Yup, that's probably about... 5 more years + a job, after I get out of college and try to barely scrape by as a musician...

Oh boy do I wish I had money to spend... I think I'm first going to save up for headphones that are $600+, before I shoot for this dap/dac. That is, eventually... years later, haha.

It will only ever support up to 32 GB as that is the limit on the memory card type used