EDIT: Hisound Audio to Release New DAP Product-Line (NOVA with micro SD card support) - Page 7

 

HI, Audionnewbi

 

Thanks for your question. Sure we have the products line with the compliance with 192kbps files in near future. 

 

For we have clearly products lines. NOVA is a " sport" type player which will have very slim body and with many useful functions , such as recording and radio.  

 

As the STUDIO and above models, they will be focus on the " pure sound quality". they will only focus on the high quality sound. it will have no recording and  FM radio fuctions. 

 

We will have the full line hifi player models. We hope we can be the leader of hifi portable player.

I am sure I am not the only one in head-fi who is excited about this great news. I personally do not care about and FM features, I always prefer high quality sound for my music collection over wifi or spotify support any day.

Cant wait ;-)

and if it can wear a miniskirt and make me a sandwich every now and then would be perfect!

It will not possible to wear the mini skirt, But to come with a cloth pouch is possible. 

LOL

Jack can you please make a small HQ sounding DAP that has no amp built in ? just a line out to use with a portable headphone amp.

 

I'm waiting for a product like this, I will always use my GS Voyager, so never use the built in headphone amp, it wouldn't even need

a volume control.

 

Also one with just a digital output could be popular.

 

thanks
 

   Hi, KT 66, 

 

 Thank you for your question. 

 It  is a good suggest to have a player with a good line out. It is more easier to design such a device than to have a built in amplifier.

 

 We will consider your great suggestion.

 

 By  the way, bundled external amplifier with the sound sources device is a burden for users to carry during your dailly using. we hope the built in amplifier will replace the external amplifier. of course, it will use 2 in 1 design products to convince our consumers. 

 

I don't know if you have ever listen any one of our 2 in 1 player? if not, you can consult to any of our players owner for the comparation performance of our player to the bundled solution.

 

The reason why we still not made the good player with out amplifier section? it is because we don't find out there are many portable earphone amplifiers have quality sound.About 80% of the portable earphone amplifiers are below our standards. so, with only line out player, it will have less value for there less good portable earphone amplifier to pair it.

 

Anyway, we will serious consider your suggestion.  Thanks.

by the way, there are too many device has line out can be selected. such as Smart phones and PCs.

 

if paired with the higher quality earphone amplifier, the line out of IPHONE is also very good.

 

Of course, you will said what you need is the 192K speed, But to be frankly, as portable device, most DAP WHICH claim to provide 192k speed is not really 192k. It is upsampled to be 192 k. It is not benifit to really largely improve the sound quality.

 

As the digital out signal, 44.1, 44.8 or 96 kHZ sources are good enough. why there are so many audiophiles are not satisfied with it? it is because there are few excellent amplifier to pair with these speeds of music sources. So the audiophiles image to improve the final sound sources by higher speed sources. 

 

Please be aware, CD's sample speed is lower than MP3 files. but the high end CD player is much higher quality than any mp3 players. 

 

This is why we stress that the earphone amplifier is the key or bottle neck on the portable audio system. This is why we say 80 % of the portable earphone amplifier's sound quality is below our standard.

 

We insist the future of portable audio is not higher and higher sampling speed but the high quality amplifiers and high quality earphones.

 

for ear is hard to distinguish the difference of 0 and 1 with the speed of 192khz or 44.1; 44.8 ,96 KHZ.

 

We hope more will chin in to this standpoints. I want to know how many audiophile will support our view point that bassed on current 44.1 khz and 192 khz Sample speed, the key to improve the portable rigs' sound quality is not higher sampling speed, but the excellent amplifiers and earphones.

 

Thanks.

I think it is due to the increase in populairty of 24/96 files due to sites like hdtracks. People are becoming more and more interested in such files and they naturally like to have a DAP which plays those files bit to bit perfectly so they do not have to downsample their album.

 

I personally enjoy what I hear from hisound DAP. I really enjoy the upper range details I hear from that unit. I believe with more balance with the lower and mid the hisound DAP will be a perfect DAP. I honestly do not need to have 24/96 flac support if I know I have a DAP which is well balance across all the frequencies. I really enjoy the hisound sound, I hope future revision brings more balance to the lower end.

 

Can you please give us more information about the nova, to what unit it is going to be comparable to soundwise, what IEM do you recommend with this? How is the hiss issue?

 

PS:I really have faith in the hisound engineers, they know how to bring the best out of the parts they are using. I agree with your philosophy, however you quest for bringing most detail has reduce the fun factor from your wonderful DAP. I love detail however I miss the lower end warmth which somewhat lacking from your units.

I do want to point out that one of the reason why DX100 is able to do it is because they are doing it all in the software mode with essential an almost full feature ARM based CPU. Most SoC used in DAP doesn't have that much processing power so SoC manufacturer hardware coded all the coder onto the chip in effort to play certain format with the minimum available processing power. Since >16/48 is never that popular, most SoC simply doesn't support it in hardware - and without the kind of CPU like DX100 or dedicated firmware design, getting 24/96 and above is actually very difficult for the DAP maker, especially since most SoC supplier will see no benefit on their end to custom tune their firmware for only a handful of devices that are only ordered in small quantity. Thus the reason why iBasso takes the Android route as it is an open OS that they can take advantage of, as opposed to HifiMan which takes over 2 years to develop their own firmware in the upcoming HM901 to support 24/96 and above. A opposite example will be ColorFly's C3, which has a DAC that supports 24bit decoding but the Rockchip SoC they used isn't known to support 24bit format in most format so they ended up only support 24bit in wav but not the others.

In now day and age hardware power is relatively cheap. I believe the bottle neck is the software in most cases. 

Well, hardware and software are both half of the story on their own. SoC used on DAP is quite different from CPU that you will find on smartphone. They are built to have almost everything on a single chip to save cost, so space and power is a premier. Often, they are designed alongside with highly classified firmware as well. Most of the time, especially if you are a small company order your SoC from a supplier, you have almost no access to the source code yourself and have to rely 100% on the SoC supplier to customize their firmware for you. You might think if we can stuff a 1.5kHz quad core in smartphone, doing it on DAP shouldn't be a problem - but that is exactly the opposite. In most part of the world, smartphone are highly subsidized by the cellphone network provider. But no one is subsidizing the DAP maker for the same hardware. So instead of a $150 smart CPU that required a lot more parts to work, DAP maker is more inclined to use a $50 SoC.that is highly integrated. Then of course they still have the software to tackle (or in many case, the inability to tackle).