I finally spent some quality time with the DP-X1 today, at the Onkyo/TEAC showroom near Tokyo station. I had no idea this place existed; it is quite comfortable, relaxed and I was one of two customers there. The new Onkyo and the Pioneer DAPs are sitting out, untethered and you can listen at your leisure. They have a wide range of headphones to demo, including Onkyo and Philips of course but also a Beyer T5p, that new $2K+ Pioneer, etc. They also have universal demo units of all 3 of Onkyo`s new CIEMs.
So I was able to put the DP-X1 next to my AK120ii, and compare both in a quiet, relaxed environment. I was using my own files, with my microSD in the Onkyo. My IEMs are UniqueMelody Maverick, 10-driver hybrids, with JVC Spiraldot tips and a Spiral Strands 2.5trrs balanced cable. Wide range of musical genres, but all of it well mastered, `audiophile`, etc.
First the good news: The Onkyo sounds fantastic. In my opinion as good or better than I hoped and probably many of you are hoping. Soundstage huge, imaging precise, and that same ethereal blackest background a la AK380 - that was noticeable to me immediately. A good indication of indescribable positive sound quality is that with every track I played, I did not want to turn it off, I wanted to listen to each track until the end. Highly musical. I would say in the most general sense the DP-X1 sounds better than my AK120ii, from the balanced output. (The T5p, I headphone I used to own and feel I know well, also sounded fantastic out of the single ended output.)
Another positive is build quality. It`s definitely on par with the 120ii. The AK feels more substantial due to its brick-like form and weight, but really, on close inspection there are no shortcomings on the Onkyo. The body is seamless, the display is absolutely flush with the frame, the volume wheel is rock solid, there were no scratches around the USB or headphone outputs on this well-handled unit. The staff still would not give me any details on included accessories, like a fitted leather case, but one would work very well.
Now, the bad. The UI is a mess. Very confusing to navigate around, very frustrating and illogical, counter-intuitive process-flow. (And I am very very far from being a technophobe and am familiar with many software platforms). Basically, a lot of hunting, back-tracking and multiple redundancies. The most serious software issue is that the volume problem I experienced with the demo unit in my friend`s shop a few weeks ago (and reported here) was present with the unit today : the on-screen volume control lags a fraction of a second, so that you end up raising it too high. Worse, the same lag was coming from the physical volume wheel as well. I tried again and again and it consistently jumped between 10 and 20 steps on the 160-step volume scale, either up or down. Turning the volume down, at around 25 it would leap to zero. The only way to access volume steps in between is to go to zero and then scroll back up.
Worse, I had my ears blasted twice by volume spikes when switching tracks. No explanation for this, just random max volume for an instant, making me very hesitant to proceed. After two of these initially, it didn`t happen again. Also, the notification volume (the clicks you hear when you select an icon or button) was super loud, irritating and after setting it to zero it would spontaneously rise in volume again. There were other bugs : When I wanted to listen to the single-ended T5p, I could not find the control to switch on and off the balance drive, even though I had definitely seen it in a menu. I called the Onkyo guy over and he could not find it either. Finally I restarted the DP-X1 and it was re-manifested in the menu where I had initially seen it. Typical crap IT bug.
Finally, and for me personally, the worst : it seems that in its current version the UI is stuck in permanent Android smartphone mode. I had assumed there would be some kind of `pure audio` mode that would present to me visually a dedicated music player, like the AKs. Instead, listening to music on the DP-X1 is exactly the same interactive experience as listening to music on my Huawei smart phone. Worse than my Huawei, there was some extremely irritating process whereby if during listening to music I touched the `back` button one too many times, I was presented with a google search window at the top of the screen, with no way to get rid of except digging back into some menu and re-selecting `Music` . Maybe some people don`t care about this but for me it is a deal-breaker. I do not want to look at rows of colorful apps like Yahoo!, etc and have google search windows over my album art, etc.
There is a mode you can switch on called `Stand Alone` mode, which promises to isolate the device for music playback but this function oddly turns the screen instantly off. Turning the screen back on seems to de-activate this stand-alone function (it was impossible to be sure one way or the other).
Here are some pics I took today.
Lots of variety in which ever English you would like to use. (Other languages available, of course.):
The `Stand-alone` mode. If music is playing, it works, I guess, but it instantly turns off the display, so to control the music player beyond the three basic physical buttons you have to de-activate this mode by turning the screen back on. I guess.
Hit that back button one too many times and your album art gets overlaid with google smartphone functions, which you cannot turn off without going into a menu and re-selecting `Music` :
So overall my impression is that the unit sounds fantastic and will be the killer we all hope it will be, once they get it optimized. If this unit, on display in Onkyo`s own show room, is this buggy, then I have my doubts about the 11/28 release date. The staff there today would not confirm any date, but admitted the UI was not totally stable and therefore the release might be delayed (regardless of what Amazon.jp is saying.)
It is important to note that all of my negative experiences today were due to one thing only : un-optimized software. This is totally fixable, pre-release and post-release through firmware updates. I would definitely buy this DAP if they enable an app-less pure audio firmware mode. I told them this today and they acknowledged the appeal of that, but frankly told me that Onkyo is counting on the `ecosystem` revenue, ie making money from their E-onkyo media website by direct-downloading content to this DAP, and for that they think people need a familiar interface, ie a smartphone.
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