[goodvibes]

Unit is worth the money but I didn't find it special in any way. Warm and inoffensive which is cool but not as revealing as the best DAPs, which is OK considering the price and size. Dumping on other high price players doesn't make this one any better. Nor does it's moderate price make it any worse. I've personally been inside DX90, ak100, ak120, LPG, Sansa(s) and know what goes into a Tera Player. Tweaked a few of them for kicks. Anyone with a TP that is counting components in anything else, including AK, is being a bit disingenuous. Hard to beat the value of a Sansa, FiiO or iBasso if that's your criterion. Consider how many of the boutique type items would even exist if the market wasn't effectively created by AK in the 1st place.
 
I personally don't like counting parts as a measure of value in something designed to play music and thought I'd add my perspective on it. If an Alien...or AK or LPG or Tera rings your bell for what it cost, it's worth it to you and that's all that matters. No need to dump on other items to justify anything.

 

[walfredo]

Yeah... This little playing is growing on me.
 
The soundstage and clarity is awesome, specially with vocals and acoustic.  
 
The interface can also be interesting.  Sometimes less is more.  

 

[Kangeki]

Yeah... This little playing is growing on me.
 
The soundstage and clarity is awesome, specially with vocals and acoustic.  
 
The interface can also be interesting.  Sometimes less is more.  

... And dynamic !

As for interface, I totally agree. It is also very slim, I am alternating with the Cayin N5 depending on the mood of the moment or the situation.

The only thing I regret with the interface is that it is so easy to turn on that sometimes it just consumes battery when it is in the bag so it needs extra care if you don't want to run out of battery for such a reason.
However, I must admit that this button also makes its charm (easy to turn on and just let go the music) and that it does not happen so often once we take care of it so it is not such a big deal

 

[tbritton]

Just for the newcomers here, expatinjapan wrote a post explaining the lights and buttons (and how to get into shuffle mode) in this post.
 
I have heard that the second long down-press takes one into single repeat mode, but never got around to testing that.
 
Terry

 

[emusic13]

As a Dap, the Alien certainly isn't one of the best having background noise etc. and for the price, there are better options. But as a small, screenless, and simple to operate player, I would say its one of the best considering the very few options available in that category; in that case the Alien is quite worth it with its build quality and sound. I personally wouldn't buy one again but if someone does, importing one from SG would be good idea to bring the cost based on exchange rate down to very reasonable standards

 

[kwhoku]

Hi all, I am new to this forum. 
 
Thank you for all of your comment in this thread. After reading up, I decided to buy a Shozy Alien Gold and I totally love it. With my Audio Technica IM-03 and a 7 NCC copper cable, I feel great clarity and wide sound stage. 
 
I am now looking for a new pair of dynamic drive or hybrid IEM which has synergy with the Alien and provides good bass. May I seek some advice here?
 
Thanks in advance. 

 

[Raketen]

Hi all, I am new to this forum. 

Thank you for all of your comment in this thread. After reading up, I decided to buy a Shozy Alien Gold and I totally love it. With my Audio Technica IM-03 and a 7 NCC copper cable, I feel great clarity and wide sound stage. 

I am now looking for a new pair of dynamic drive or hybrid IEM which has synergy with the Alien and provides good bass. May I seek some advice here?

Thanks in advance. 

Lately I've been listening with Panasonic RP-HDE10 and find it very nice pairing with Alien, they are fairly bassy, but not extreme, slightly on the smooth & warm midbass kinda side, though might sound veiled coming from BA iem... took me a little bit to adjust to them.

 

[Gosod]

In a good way?

yeah
I haven't seen before, a player of similar shape!

 

[JWizzlez]

Just got my Alien from eBay and I can't get it to play. Sifting through this thread and I've seen a few helpful answers but nothing is working.
 
I have a 64 GB microSD formatted to exFAT [My mac and my PC don't have a FAT32 option]. I put just FLACs in folders with no other files inside. I turn on the player and it lights green. Doesn't play. Tried turning up volume, all that stuff. No luck. Tried charging it overnight and the red light turned off. Still when I turn it on the light is just solid green, although when I turn it to an angle, I see a kind of white light blinking inconsistently. I tried clearing everything off the card and just uploading 3 flac files, but it still won't play. I have it plugged in to my laptop to charge and am trying to listen to it while charging but still just a solid green light and no audio.
 
Any suggestions? 

 

[musicday]

Just got my Alien from eBay and I can't get it to play. Sifting through this thread and I've seen a few helpful answers but nothing is working.

I have a 64 GB microSD formatted to exFAT [My mac and my PC don't have a FAT32 option]. I put just FLACs in folders with no other files inside. I turn on the player and it lights green. Doesn't play. Tried turning up volume, all that stuff. No luck. Tried charging it overnight and the red light turned off. Still when I turn it on the light is just solid green, although when I turn it to an angle, I see a kind of white light blinking inconsistently. I tried clearing everything off the card and just uploading 3 flac files, but it still won't play. I have it plugged in to my laptop to charge and am trying to listen to it while charging but still just a solid green light and no audio.

Any suggestions? 

Your card need to be FAT32 formatted to work if bigger then 32 GB.
Get a smaller one and it will work for sure.

 

[Kangeki]

Your card need to be FAT32 formatted to work if bigger then 32 GB.
Get a smaller one and it will work for sure.

You can also force FAT32 on 64 Gb cards with some light softwares. For example guiformat.
I use way less memory microSD card with my Alien as I believe it is not very adapted for big music library all in once on the card. I prefer to charge it with music quite regurlarly, but it is kind of a philosophy with that DAP.
 
Edit : like the next post I was thinking about guiformat and not Fat32Formatter, thank you Raketen for remembering me its name

 

[Raketen]

Just got my Alien from eBay and I can't get it to play. Sifting through this thread and I've seen a few helpful answers but nothing is working.

I have a 64 GB microSD formatted to exFAT [My mac and my PC don't have a FAT32 option]. I put just FLACs in folders with no other files inside. I turn on the player and it lights green. Doesn't play. Tried turning up volume, all that stuff. No luck. Tried charging it overnight and the red light turned off. Still when I turn it on the light is just solid green, although when I turn it to an angle, I see a kind of white light blinking inconsistently. I tried clearing everything off the card and just uploading 3 flac files, but it still won't play. I have it plugged in to my laptop to charge and am trying to listen to it while charging but still just a solid green light and no audio.

Any suggestions? 

I use a smaller 32gb card but guiformat program seems to do the FAT32 trick. Also remember to strip tags from your files, I usually just convert everything to wav before loading seems to work a little more consistently (usually I also have foobar strip the file names and dump in a folder labeled album-artist, I don't think this is necessary but just on the off chance a too-long filename or non-alphanumeric characters or symbols trip it up).

 

[walfredo]

Also, your FLAC cannot have meta data, and needs to be in a top-level folder (no files on the root folder, no files in folders within folders).

 

[BruceBanner]

  Just got my Alien from eBay and I can't get it to play. Sifting through this thread and I've seen a few helpful answers but nothing is working.
 
I have a 64 GB microSD formatted to exFAT [My mac and my PC don't have a FAT32 option]. I put just FLACs in folders with no other files inside. I turn on the player and it lights green. Doesn't play. Tried turning up volume, all that stuff. No luck. Tried charging it overnight and the red light turned off. Still when I turn it on the light is just solid green, although when I turn it to an angle, I see a kind of white light blinking inconsistently. I tried clearing everything off the card and just uploading 3 flac files, but it still won't play. I have it plugged in to my laptop to charge and am trying to listen to it while charging but still just a solid green light and no audio.
 
Any suggestions? 

 
Sounds to me yer FLAC is not the kinda FLAC yer Alien likes. This was a common issue.

Bung a handful of FLAC files into foobar and use it's conversion tool to remake them FLAC again (dw u can duplicate copies and not overwrite). Alien tended to like Foobar made flac files (and the foobar logo IS an alien shaped heid! coincidence? I think not!).

 

[Kangeki]

Is your Mac running with Mac OS X ? It seems it is supposed to propose the option to format in Fat32 even if the card is > 32 Gio.

However, Windows does not give the option to format in Fat32 for > 32 Gio cards.

(Gio and not Go according to Wikipedia. Please see Wikipedia's article on Octen (Computing), section "Unit multiples", but I believe in our case it does not make such a difference)

Maybe is it linked to SDXC ?

Anyway, have you tried to use guiformat like stated previously ? It can force Fat32 on SDXC cards. Your computer may find it is a problem but you can just ignore it and copy your files, it will be ok.