swanlee
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2008
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So I have been pretty happy with my SFLO:2 for the last year as a side note I have been looking for a good Win7 tablet for pretty much the last 5 years. Little did I think these paths would cross.
As you know win7 tablets have been slow to come out, people have harped that Win7 cannot be used for touch screen devices and heralded the Ipad as the second coming.
For my needs an ipad is useless, simply a bigger ipod touch. I've always wanted a really good win7 tablet.
Well a month ago I got an EXOPC, 11.6 inch Win7 tablet, 2Gb ram, very fast 64GB SSD etc.
You can see it here
www.exopc.com
I'll include a picture in this post.
For starters win7 works great on a touch device win7 out of the box is built for touch but a few tweaks and 5 mins later and it is even more usable. Don't let anyone talk down Win7 on a touch device as chances are they have not used it and are just parroting some apple talking points.
It works, it works well and it allows you use of millions of programs.
Now onto the Audio portion of this shpeal.
So the cool part of a portable win7 device is the ability to install any audio program and playback any audio codec.
This right here cuts out alot of issues with normal portable audio devices,
So I installed Foobar 2000 and played tweaked the EQ within it and played back some .wma and .flac files
low and behold the headphone output on this device sounds stellar. I was quite surprised I never intended this device to end up as my primary portable audio player but it has done that now.
As you may know I really loved my SFLO2 and posted ALOT about it here, it is still a great player but I have to admit I enjoy the output on the EXOPC more than the SFLO:2
I have not done any RMAA tests or anything but here are some thing the EXOPC does better.
No background noise at all, the noise floor is completely silent, no buzzing in the background, no hiss no nothing, literally has a super clean and silent noise floor.
Very powerful output, the SFLO:2 is pretty powerful but the EXOPC output is even more powerful with no distortion and is able to power headphones very well.
No high end drop off, high are crystal clear, adjusting the high upper freqs in the foobar EQ makes a huge differences so the hardware is not limiting higher up freqs.
So from a straight sound perspective I was pretty shocked but really do think the EXOPC sounds better than my SFLO:2
So the other cool part of a Win7 portable audio device is it gives me full access to my 1TB of lossless audio. The unit only has 64GB on board and it has an SD card slot as well to give you up to 96GB of storage. But on my Wifi network I simply map a drive to my external media drive and just like that my 1TB of lossless audio is there and playable over wifi.
Something so simple as simply mapping a drive in windows just opens up huge possibilities and takes away any storage space issues while you are on your network.
something to consider though
For purely portable on the road use with no wifi access you are stuck with 96GB max, after win7 and programs it is more like 80GB. Battery life is only a little over 4 hrs, bummer but pretty good when you consider this is a full blown pc in a tablet form that has great headphone out SQ. But I'm sure some people will simply run away at 4hrs battery life. at 11.6 inches it is not pocket friendly
Now for the way I use a portable audio device this does not bother me, I actually tend to be at home and use headphones to not bother my wife and 1 year old son. So it is pretty cool to be listening to music in great quality, surf the web, walk around the house with it.
From a pure portable standpoint it still can be useful as it is more codec and player friendly than the ipad and I'd hazard a guess that it sounds better as well since it trumps the SFLO:2 in SQ.
As a windows device with USB ports you could also connect an external DAC for even better SQ.
I'm aware that size, and battery life may make it completely useless to most as a portable audio device, but if you are in this tiny little niche that can deal with this and wants a good sounding tablet that can map a drive to Windows pc's and play back any codec audio then this would be a great option.
As you know win7 tablets have been slow to come out, people have harped that Win7 cannot be used for touch screen devices and heralded the Ipad as the second coming.
For my needs an ipad is useless, simply a bigger ipod touch. I've always wanted a really good win7 tablet.
Well a month ago I got an EXOPC, 11.6 inch Win7 tablet, 2Gb ram, very fast 64GB SSD etc.
You can see it here
www.exopc.com
I'll include a picture in this post.
For starters win7 works great on a touch device win7 out of the box is built for touch but a few tweaks and 5 mins later and it is even more usable. Don't let anyone talk down Win7 on a touch device as chances are they have not used it and are just parroting some apple talking points.
It works, it works well and it allows you use of millions of programs.
Now onto the Audio portion of this shpeal.
So the cool part of a portable win7 device is the ability to install any audio program and playback any audio codec.
This right here cuts out alot of issues with normal portable audio devices,
So I installed Foobar 2000 and played tweaked the EQ within it and played back some .wma and .flac files
low and behold the headphone output on this device sounds stellar. I was quite surprised I never intended this device to end up as my primary portable audio player but it has done that now.
As you may know I really loved my SFLO2 and posted ALOT about it here, it is still a great player but I have to admit I enjoy the output on the EXOPC more than the SFLO:2
I have not done any RMAA tests or anything but here are some thing the EXOPC does better.
No background noise at all, the noise floor is completely silent, no buzzing in the background, no hiss no nothing, literally has a super clean and silent noise floor.
Very powerful output, the SFLO:2 is pretty powerful but the EXOPC output is even more powerful with no distortion and is able to power headphones very well.
No high end drop off, high are crystal clear, adjusting the high upper freqs in the foobar EQ makes a huge differences so the hardware is not limiting higher up freqs.
So from a straight sound perspective I was pretty shocked but really do think the EXOPC sounds better than my SFLO:2
So the other cool part of a Win7 portable audio device is it gives me full access to my 1TB of lossless audio. The unit only has 64GB on board and it has an SD card slot as well to give you up to 96GB of storage. But on my Wifi network I simply map a drive to my external media drive and just like that my 1TB of lossless audio is there and playable over wifi.
Something so simple as simply mapping a drive in windows just opens up huge possibilities and takes away any storage space issues while you are on your network.
something to consider though
For purely portable on the road use with no wifi access you are stuck with 96GB max, after win7 and programs it is more like 80GB. Battery life is only a little over 4 hrs, bummer but pretty good when you consider this is a full blown pc in a tablet form that has great headphone out SQ. But I'm sure some people will simply run away at 4hrs battery life. at 11.6 inches it is not pocket friendly
Now for the way I use a portable audio device this does not bother me, I actually tend to be at home and use headphones to not bother my wife and 1 year old son. So it is pretty cool to be listening to music in great quality, surf the web, walk around the house with it.
From a pure portable standpoint it still can be useful as it is more codec and player friendly than the ipad and I'd hazard a guess that it sounds better as well since it trumps the SFLO:2 in SQ.
As a windows device with USB ports you could also connect an external DAC for even better SQ.
I'm aware that size, and battery life may make it completely useless to most as a portable audio device, but if you are in this tiny little niche that can deal with this and wants a good sounding tablet that can map a drive to Windows pc's and play back any codec audio then this would be a great option.