My trusty ES5's suffered a right earpiece failure about two years ago. I have other IEMs and just shifted to them. Kept meaning to send these off, but never did. About May, I finally sent them off. Westone contacted me about ten days later to let me know one of the drivers had gotten loose; they...

I can't speak to the T1 but with the Fostex TH-X00 and Westone ES5 the AR offers superior soundstage and imaging and a more 'natural' presentation. The Chord is of course extremely visceral and powerful and sounds very good but the AR M2 truly does sound 'just sound like music'. With the Chord I...

The Samsung 256gb EVO+ cards are available in Hong Kong for approximately US$150. I bought several at the Golden Computer Arcade. Ran H2TESTW on them and they checked out fully.

EXCELLENT! And the 'typhoon' was indeed a non-event. I don't leave until Tuesday so I will be sure to come. Where may I find more details?

...looks like I picked the wrong time to visit Hong Kong. This is gonna be fun. 

This may help someone. I have a Dell XPS15 9550 and was having horrific problems with my Chord Hugo with distortion on playback of 192 kHz or greater PCM files and DSD files. Turns out; the Chord drivers may not be properly prioritizing themselves or there's a conflict between them and Intel...

If you have a player with China firmware and care about Google Play, DO NOT UPDATE or you will LOSE Google Play. I am not sure if it is removed in 1.1 or 1.2. I went straight to 1.2 and PFFT gone. A workaround exists; Amazon App Store works just fine when sideloaded and installed via ES File...

May be an issue with overall number of tracks? How big is the card and how many tracks?

Not very. But it does seem to struggle once a larger number of tracks are added. Mine choked on a full 128GB card until the latest 1.13 firmware update. I believe there's about 4500 songs on it.

You really should. The more I listen the more I am impressed with it. It is the best all-round DAP I've used to date. The build quality, ease of use, sound quality, power, interface, size, battery life; while the i5 is not the best in most of those areas, it is very near the top and no other...

I found this out AFTER I loaded 1.2. I don't see the initial 1.0 firmware posted to be able to roll back. I'll also note that going from 1.0 to 1.2 required a hard wipe, I'm assuming because of the removal of the Play store and the associated framework where I'd already installed apps. I know I...

Until I have more break-in and listening time I don't want to go into detail on sound. My initial impressions are very good. It's far beyond the Plenue D (as would be expected), has more than enough power to drive the Fostex TH-X00 to concert-level volumes with no compression or distortion, and...

  Where and when will international firmware versions be available? Just got back and getting started with the i5 but would prefer the international firmware.

Regardless of your opinion on the card; the reviews on Amazon.co.jp are riotous even through Google Translate. It even heals tone deaf daughter-in-laws.

    Just did in the post before yours.    http://www.head-fi.org/t/789488/cowon-plenue-d/2895#post_12657086

[double post]

  I have the Spirit Pros but not with me; I haven't tried them yet with the Plenue D.   I'll preface by saying I really like the PD. It works well, latest firmware update has fixed an issue I had with full 128GB SD cards, the battery life is incredible and it's a very convenient player to...

Mine shipped and is in Houston. I'm 7,000 miles away. ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGHHHHH!!!

..so ALAC, FLAC and WAV are all file 'containers' and are different ways to house audio data which may vary in sample rate and bit depth. ALAC and FLAC are compressed in that they throw away redundant data but are lossless in that no actual musical content is destroyed as opposed to the way MP3...

    

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Why? I suppose it depends on which company has the superior engineering and software know-how; either Zhuhai Spark, or iRiver. Let us not forget that "Astell & Kern" came from very humble beginnings as a decent but not terribly notable second tier DAP manufacturer pushing out such forgettables...

Turn off all the audio processing. I noticed this when using certain presets; when a song would fade out I'd hear what sounds like quantization noise. Wasn't doing it on BBE but was on some of the other named presets. Turned off the processing and it went away. 

Harvard Business Review goes into quite a bit of detail, but in short... price as high as the market will allow and have other products at lower strata to capture sales and profit across economic abilities. Price needn't be related to cost and in the case of the AK, almost certainly isn't. Their...

....because somewhere, out there.... are people willing to pay for it. For this principle taken to the ultimate extreme please also see the tera-player, now priced at EUR10,000.