HiFiMAN HM-801 Portable Player / DAC Review: Part One of Two - Page 7

and in the absence of fang either wanting rockbox or his team being able to port it or lacking the desire to, its down to the rockbox development team or anyone else who would volunteer to do it.

Whining that it doesn't come with rockbox is like whining ipods dont come equipped with it.

On an audiophile high end dap, I would imagine the focus is elsewhere other than ensuring rockbox is available on it.

If you wan't it on there, buy one and donate it to someone over at rockbox if they are interested in developing for the player like I originally said.

Why you want to change already the interface with other one when you don't have seem the existing one ?

I don't think fang has said that he doesn't want rockbox on it yet, although he hasn't said he does want it either.

Methinks the reason this is being pushed is because it is already pretty darn close to being the PDAP to end all PDAPs. From the looks of it it just lacks a few small things that keep it from becoming that as well. Rockbox would take care of almost all of them.

Personally, I think that SDHC cards would work fine. A full CD is about 2gb or so in FLAC last I checked, so you could hold 8 albums on a 16gb card. When you think about it, you can just buy a few extra SDHC cards and swap them out as well as just put different albums on them every few days/weeks. It might be a bit of a change for the people who use 160gb ipods and 240gb H1xxs, but I get by with a 8gb cowon u5 myself, so I'm perfectly fine with swapping songs on a regular basis.

Oh, jude said that part 2 would be in a few days on the 12th. It's the 16th now, any updates?

So, Jude, is this player limited production or a permanent installment in the Head-Direct product line?

I'm not sure what kind of FLAC files you listen to but most of my FLAC albums are much smaller than 2GB, more on the order of 250 to 500MB.

What high-end components?

Why not try a Sabre DAC (i.e. 21st century). Not saying old is bad, quite the contrary, but just curious; maybe more cost effective?

This is a great portable device either way as PCM1704 is highly regarded.

DC

Amen. Or some modern AKM DAC... what's good enough for the best professional sound cards (like RME and Echo) should be good enough for "audiophiles" as well.

Implementation is important and I'll bet the DAC sounds great. Recording engineers were comparing the Lynx L22 to the 1616m and choosing the Lynx sound; both use the same AD converters.

I'm selling my Lavry AD10 and going back to 1212M/1616M for vinyl archiving; I think the emphasis should be placed on the source in this case with a good cart and clean gain.

Considered Layla 3G for a bit but it's too big and I'm already familiar with EMU Patchmix.

Echo>"We are using really high end digital audio converters > CS4272 ( almost as good as a Lavry AD10)".

DC

Don't know how you figure that. Highest capacity 80 minutes cd's are 700 MB raw data and since flac compresses size (not sound) a full album in flac usually never exceeds 500 mb.

EDIT: PeterDLai beat me to that comment

You ever thought about audio compression is there to make things smaller? FLAC is usually about 50% of uncompressed PCM/WAV audio, as found on audio CDs. So since a 74 minute audio CD holds 650MB, the resulting FLAC would be about 325MB.

Pardon me just checking 4cd albums to see how big a CD is. >_>

Could have sworn they were bigger than 400mb though.

since its a lossless compression format, i would suspect that final results depend on how detailed is the album being compressed with relation to the algorithem used for the compression,

in other words, it depends on the album,

Bingo.

Quite frankly, I'm surprised at the response this has got.

This is easily one of the coolest, most ambitious, most desirable products I've ever seen come from this community, assuming it lives up to expectations. There has been a vacuum in portable hi-fi audio for something like this for AS LONG AS I CAN REMEMBER.

How many people here have invested $1000 in an Imod and portable amp?

For me, this all boils down to size.

If this device is able to do the things it's said to be able to do in a package that's more manageable than the external amp/dac/dap combos that are currently 'bundled' together in a supremely non-ergonomic fashion, I am going to be a happy camper.

This thing has the chance to be a giant-killer. I agree with those that are skeptical as to whether the end product can come together in such a way as to be truly market-changing, but applying criticism at this stage is way too premature, IMO.

How would an earphone sooo sensitive like the Shure SE530's see as an improvement with this HiFi Man portable player coming from the headphone out of an already superb sounding player? The Zune. Jude, I want to experience the feeling of the sound of a $700 hi fidelity portable audio player.....