Teclast X33 Impressions.

As far as Chinese PMP producers are concerned, Teclast have a flare for hardware design and they a little better at firmware than most others in China. since they have firmware updates easily available through there website going back a few years.

In the wake of many MP4 and Android tablet devices, there is a small hole where more advanced music only devices should be.

Teclast has just released 2 products to fill it - the X33 and the X18.

I had the X18 for a day. but I think most would want to skip this for the X33 as it has more than just the basic Mp3 and WMV support and other features. Unlike the web-pages currently available for these products say, the actual devices both have MicroSD expansion and can handle my 32Gb card with the only caveat that it appears to slow down its operation to handle such a large file system of music.

The X33 is about the size of a largish flash drive, at one end it has a retractable USB connector that slides back into the main body with a lever at one side. It has a small OLED display and 2 buttons on the main face and 5 buttons along one side, power/hold, vol up/down and forward/backward.

The display can show 4 lines of text at one time and folder navigation shows a heading with 3 choices. When navigating around, the M button on the face panel is select and the play/pause button is equivalent to a back button.

It integrates the MicroSD card into the explorer, which is where you kick off the music mode, so it treats internal and external memory the same way. I don't think it has any support for playlists, but I have never used this so I don't mind. It has good folder support. like play a folder through to the last track, or play a folder through once wherever you start or repeat one/one folder/all plus shuffle.

The sound quality is about average - its uses the RKnano chipset, which is quite popular in many devices at present. The thing I like most about its sound is the EQ, it has a custom EQ mode that suits me with 5 bands going from +9 to -9 dB at 62Hz, 250Hz, 1K, 4K and 16K. This reminds me of good walkmans back 20 years ago - the same feel can be recreated with no wow/flutter/hiss problems.

It also has support for PlayFX /3D sound or Bass boost, which I don't use. It supports Mp3, WMV, AAC, FLAC and APE. I don't think it supports CUE files, I haven't tried. It drives my 32 Ohm Blox TM5 earbuds with a useful volume range of 18-26 out of a maximum of 40. I have not had enough time with it to say how long the battery life is - if people are interested, I will post a more thorough review in time.

Roundup: Great portable player, extremely lightweight and although all plastic, it kind of suits the overall feel of the device - its not the best device inside or out, but is very practical for on the go. Seriously reminds me of a kind of advanced-retro walkman replacement.

Pros:

- Small and lightweight like a flash drive. - Practical with its MicrosSD slot and inbuilt retractable USB connector.

- Sound is good with EQ quite useful.

- Good folder playback support.

- Teclast are a good Chinese brand in that they will offer firmware updates over time.

- When connected to a PC, both the internal and MicroSD mass storage is shown and this works on Linux as well.

Cons:

- Don't stand on it, it will probably die.

- I only tried a 32Gb class 2 card filled with music and it is very slow to startup a new folder, maybe 30 seconds before kicking in with your selection - fast to navigate, but slow to start playing.

- The current firmware appears to have a work-around for the loud pop between tracks, unfortunately it does this by doing a kind of cross-fade between tracks, which loses a few seconds of each track into silence. I hope they change this, maybe avoid the pop by bufferring and having no-gap at all, that is what we all want I think.

- Current firmware seems to have a problem that it confuses the buttons sometimes when you connect the USB and disconnect - it can mix up which buttons do what and requires a reset to fix - there is a small reset hole at one end.

Retails for 199 yuan, which is around 30 USD.

For some Pictures, see the Teclast Chinese website: http://www.teclast.com/zhuanti/x33

Sorry for the lack of newlines, the server doesn't like Linux Firefox.

I had to edit this on my phone.

Quote:

Originally Posted by shureThing 

Is there a way to get it in English? ^^ sounds interesting.

 

Does it have any in-built memory?

 

Thanks!

Language support:

Simplified Chinese

Traditional Chinese

English

Thai

Korean

Spanish

French

Dutch

Italian

Portugese

Russian

Swedish

Polish

Danish

German

Russian

Turkish

Arabic

There were another 2 I didn't recognise.

I have been using it a day now, my estimate for battery life is maybe 10 hours - not great, however the device has better sound than I first thought for on the go, big sound, if you like bass then the eq gives you full deep impacting bass and the trebles are not harsh.

It has 4Gb internal memory, it appears to be very responsive compared to my 32Gb class 2 TF card.

The strange behaviour of inserting gaps that erase bits at the start and end of tracks can be avoided by using flac files. It does not mean gapless playback, just all the music is there with flacs - the gap is about half a second.

The sound is full spectrum, but there is noise coming from the CPU, so the benefit of flacs is pretty much lost. They need to fix mp3 playback and if they made it gapless I would just love this player - as it is, its a good backup player for when my main gear is out of action.