Beautiful player. I had an IRiver over a decade ago and it's still running perfect. I've owned 3 Ipods in less than a decade and 2 are broken/dead. 

It looks like a real contender, but the volume knob doesn't look pocket-friendly to me. The specs are very impressive in spite of it...wish I had a spare $700 lying around. A lot of folks are excited for the Fiio X3, but I think this is quite intriguing, too.

I'd love a large-capacity replacement for my iPod classic... This one looked tempting, esp. with 2 mSD slots, 16 hrs playback (theoretically anyway...), a compact design and a fairly clean-looking UI.

But the volume control really is mis-placed (could live with that), the impedance is said to be unusually high (bad for IEMs, but I could live with that), and there's no ALAC or AAC support for now (and there's NO WAY I'm converting all my files AGAIN, even if it's lossless...) Since both formats are open at this point, they could potentially add it in a firmware upgrade later, but I'm not laying out that kind of $$$ on a remote possibility... too bad.

I passed off the DX100 just because of it's thickness and now I have to pass off this gorgeous looking player just because of the volume knob.

I didn't find the DX100 to be too terribly thick when I had it in my hand at a Head-Fi meet up. I put it on a table and put my iPod w/ low-profile 3M dual lock attached to my Pico Slim (my setup at the time) and the DX100 was basically the same thickness. 

Quote:

Originally Posted by AUDIOBREEDER 

I passed off the DX100 just because of it's thickness and now I have to pass off this gorgeous looking player just because of the volume knob.

I just noticed this thread and I am excited to see this device being sold on a well known site. I haven't seen it on Amazon yet like many news reports say it will be available. Hopefully some buyers will have it soon and start commenting on what they hear.

Quote:

Just a clarification: ALAC does support HiRes audio, the 16/44.1 - 48 limitation is due to the iPod hardware/firmware (for which I did separate conversions). ALAC is in some ways just a different wrapper than FLAC around the lossless data, usually conversion is only limited by drive speed (read & re-write the files) rather than AAC or MP3 which actually require CPU-intensive transcoding.

One reason I was so excited: I have quite a few HD Tracks etc. albums in better quality that play back fine on my Mac and it would nice to enjoy their potential in portable use (as you wrote) I could probably reverse those few to FLAC format separately, but all my CD rips are in ALAC too and that'd be a LOT...

As far as AAC goes, yeah it's MP3-like, don't really use it or care, just mentioned it as a (currently) unsupported format.

Hopefully, given the price tag, iRiver will put some real effort behind this product and I'll be keeping an eye on it with my cc handy 

I have an Iriver H120 that I love, but has not been used for many years. I was waiting for this player from iriver, but alas, WTF is that big ugly knob on the side?

any review on this player?

I do wish I had the cash available to try this - directly into the processor in my mobile audio system. Digital coax directly into the processor with high res tracks - would be interesting to evaluate in a blind test versus compact disc or iPod through the Pioneer P99RS head unit. 

I find the volume knob quite apealing, though it could be a problem in a pocket.

As for the codec mess. Thanks to apple not officially supporting the flac format or any other format other than their own (apart from mp3) we are all stuck with our AAC or ALAC files. And people not buying a media player because of the format their music collection has, is exactly the idea behind it. Just hate it. My personal solution: Use Linux for an unmanipulative consumer experience, convert everything to flac for enhanced flexibility, hack your ipod classic (or whatever you have) to run rockbox (yes I know, can be quite a pain in the ass) and NEVER BUY ANY APPLE PRODUCT EVER AGAIN. I went through the hassel of converting over 60Gb of music from ALAC to flac an partly having to retaging it, because my mother's Cowon S9 couldn`t read the files and apart from that I simply wanted to use it. A mess. Simply a mess. Still, I agree that iRiver, too like any other company should definitely implement AAC and ALAC support to grant users freedom to use whatever they like. Sorry slightly off topic, but this really bugs me.