Suggest me a great music player with fantastic SQ and good battery life.

The Sony X and Z series walkmen, Sansa Fuze, HM-601, Cowon X7 are great sounding DAPs.

got me hm-602 couple days ago, totally beats my android phone, HTC Desire Z. Using Shure SE-215 whit it.

Sansa Clip Plus or Zip. 

+1 on Sansa Clip

The latest PMPs like the Z2 are basically android phones without the cell antennae. The sound quality from the clip is comparable to any of them. While the Cowon's do feature an extensive EQ suite built-in, you could rockbox the clip to allow for similar functionality.

The Clip+ sounds better than the J3 without any sound enhancements of equilization. If you are into sound enhancements though, the J3 offers more options. The J3 has around 50 hours of battery life vs around 12 or so for the Clip+ playing mp3 files.I sugget you get a 2GB Clip+. It is just $30 on Amazon. Add a cheap 16GB($10) or 32GB($25) micro SDHC card to it. If you need more than 12 hours of battery life, then get a usb battery pack.

 

The Tekkeon mp1580 usb battery pack is nice since it takes nimh AA batteries and is only around $15(plus you need to add 4 nimh AA batteries).

 

http://www.amazon.com/Tekkeon-MP1580-TEKCHARGE-Battery-Charger/dp/B006FXUS1C/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336944621&sr=8-1

 

There are also smaller lighter more compack lion battery based usb battery packs.

The Duracell MyGrid usb charger looks interesting(you don't need to use the mygrid system).

 

http://www.amazon.com/Duracell-Mygrid-Usb-Charger/dp/B004AK154Q/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1336944676&sr=8-3

 

The MyGrid holds around 6,700 mwh vs around 13,000 mwh when using 4 Sanyo 2700mah AA nimh batteries in the Tekkeon mp1580. The MyGrid is much smaller and much lighter. I guess the MyGrid isn't much larger than the tiny Clip+. I guess the My grid is probably good for around 4 full charges of the Clip+ battery, while the Tekkeon mp1580 might give up to around 7 full charges(before you would need to swap the batteries in it or charge it).

Check it out, the rockbox forums have more info on presets for specific genres/headphones

Rockbox offers a much better equilizer than the Sandisk firmwre, but the Cowon player have things like BBE and other enhancements. I usually don't even use the equilizer, so the stock Sandisk firmware works fine for me.

Edited by JK1 - 5/14/12 at 5:55am

Cowon D2 (or the newer model), J3, or the ultimate portable player iBasso DX100.

The best bang for your buck dap IMO is the rockboxed ipod 5g/5.5g upgraded to 120GB or 240GB HDD. You can't beat the price for the SQ and GB's. The rockbox is a blessing which my life now depends on. You can just use the RB'd ipod as portable hard drive if you need to. Make sure to get a pair of decent phones and feed the babe with quality music.

 

Yes I am honestly biased because it sounds too good to my ears.

 

 

hey whatsup with this rockbox hype? whats it? i have an ipod classic 160gb 7th gen (newest ipod classic basically) and i believe it uses a cirrus soundcard, so how does the sound quality on my ipod compare to other portable music players?

In a nut shell, rockbox replaces the stock ipod firmware to play music in almost any format (mp3, flac, etc) and toss out the annoying iTune. It renders the ipod basically a portable hard drive so you can drag and drop to load your music files and/or non-music files. There are more with the rockbox (e.g. EQ's).

 

It's my understanding there is no officially stable version of RB for the ipod classic's.