[curtain]

What do you do when you want to break into a market dominated by chic?

You try harder. Here's a player with bang for buck. Excellent sound quality, added extras like a 4AA battery pack for immortality and wonderful Ogg Vorbis support.

*Sound Quality - (Using firmware 1.07E, beware going above)
Excellent, bordering on audiophile. Press the A-B button until you get to "Normal" EQ. A flat frequency response, good bass extension, tight upfront soundstage, this DAP will rock if you want it to. I can't fault it really for what it is. I did A-B tests comparing it with my EWX24/96 and using HD600's. It's not quite as smooth and full as the pro card but its subtle. Its good enough not to turn my pc on when I want to listen to music. There is a separate user definable EQ which is pretty good, no distortion, great for cheap buds, but I stick to no EQ or SRS for the real sound.

*Ogg Vorbis support. The best lossy format I've heard and is just tolerable if you're an audiophile. Using a quality setting of 7 and above is said not to give any perceived improvement. I stuck to 8.5, the spectrograms seemed to follow the original signal better at this level and above. You can "peel" your oggs later to a smaller file size without losing quality if the 40 Gigs isnt enough. If I had to fault Oggs versus the source, they dont sound as dense, there seems to be a slight veil but better than LAME for what it is.

*FM Stereo Record - You can record FM stereo 44Khz@320kbps from the radio, the FM tuner autoscans all available stations and turns them into presets. The tuner is good too. Mp3 bonanza.

*Battery pack. This was a big concern for me. Here's a DAP with a cheap battery option. Big plus.

Overall I have not regretted my purchase at all, I'll be spending the next few weeks encoding my music collection into Oggs and uploading them into the wonderful iRiver H340.

Cheers.

 

[Masolino]

Quote:

Originally Posted by curtain What do you do when you want to break into a market dominated by chic? You try harder. Here's a player with bang for buck. Excellent sound quality, added extras like a 4AA battery pack for immortality and wonderful Ogg Vorbis support.

If this immortality has to be ugly, well, maybe it's not so desirable then.

 

[Richteralan]

I prefer a less ugly and with same audio quality one:
iAUDIO M3

 

[rab10]

Curtain, thanks for the great mini-review for the iRiver H340 player!
As a H120 owner I am aware of the iRiver products. However, if the
H340 would have retained the Analog and Digital Optical line-output
(that the H120 has) I would have bought a brand new HD MP3 Player.

I cannot dissagree that iAudio is producing good products also. I am also
interested in their upcoming X5 model. Or I might bite on the M3, if, with
the release of the X5 makes the M3 a steal in some places.

However, I would like to see what iRiver will release next with their high
storage capacity line of HD Mp3 players. The iRiver N10, H10, H20 do not
amuse me (plus I have to have a player that is equal or greater than 20 Gigs.)
The H20 with 20 Gigs of storage does not have any line-out output jacks,
just headphone out.

(I think.)

Lets see what comes next. But the iRiver H340 is a great player, and the
tons of features it has. USBOTG is hard to resist, and no software needed
to load the player.

Thanks!

 

[Kirosia]

(Seeing as how owners say the 3** sounds exactly like the 1** series) I can't see why anyone likes the sound. I just can't. I'm sorry, it's lost on me. Audiophile is definitely not the term I'd used.

 

[Necros]

I think my 140 is neutral sounding, and sounds great, using line out to hifi pre-amp w/built in class A headphone stage. Normal EQ, no tone controls on pre-amp.
What phones do you have? What EQ?

 

[necropimp]

yeah i already plan on going iriver... unless someone comes out with a player that supports musepack

 

[Kirosia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Necros I think my 140 is neutral sounding, and sounds great, using line out to hifi pre-amp w/built in class A headphone stage. Normal EQ, no tone controls on pre-amp. What phones do you have? What EQ?

Phones I've used w/ the ihp: HD650, dt880, rs1, KSc-75, mx300,
Amps = supermini, pimeta, mg-head otl, sr-71
Other sources to compare: iriver ifp-190, Sony d25, Sony d211, onboard pc audio, crud fisher receiver

EQ: normal, rock

EDIT: I find it funny when people say they find something neutral sounding . . .

 

[Necros]

So what is it you don't like about the iriver? btw I have Lexicon/Audiolab HT pre/2ch pre and Kef Reference/Ruark speakers, DAC20 source.

I've let a dealer of pretty high end audio listen to my H140 and RS-1, and says very good sound out of it.

Sure you're not deaf?

also MP3 or OGG? Bitrate? I don't like Mp3 sound quality that much.

 

[Kirosia]

Pretty sure. I've liked almost every source, amp, headphone I've heard. I can tell the difference fairly easily. I just never thought the IHP sounded good. But you're right, it does seem to sound somewhat synergystic with the RS1, since the're both colored, agressive, and forward. Poor with other phones though. I got mine as a gift, if I could do it all over again I would've gotten an ipod or creative or something. (Screw that, I would've gotten another d211 and used the rest for a home source)

I used to say I find things neutral too til I realized I have no idea what that is in respect to the recording. I didn't mean to sound rude in my prior post. =)

 

[wolfen68]

I've always thought my 140 sounded really good with SR-225's, OK with KSC-35's, and outright bad with my UE5c's. Maybe there is something to synergy with these.

 

[catscratch]

ogg isn't bad, but it's still a lossy format. What lossless formats does the 340 support? I'm getting by on Micro and wave, and there's not enough HD space to make me happy. I'm using ER-4P and Stax SR-001, and compression artifacts are all too readily audible

 

[Kirosia]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wolfen68 I've always thought my 140 sounded really good with SR-225's, OK with KSC-35's, and outright bad with my UE5c's. Maybe there is something to synergy with these.

I agree with the grados and ksc. (never tried UEs) With the 75s the sound is between bad and decent depending on the track.

 

[wanderman]

sorry double post...and lag on my part

 

[wanderman]

can someone tell me how/why the h300 and h100 is colored? I never understood this. Does it just sound that way with certain headphones? Is the sound just different from other daps. Has anyone here done and abx test with a lossy codec at its max and flac or another lossless codec? On my system I can't here the difference and only use flac to archive my cds at it was meant to. What is the point of putting flac/lossless on a portable player when you can put a larger amount of songs at the same perceptible quality. If you can a-b test the difference or just bltantly hear the differnce between a well encoded lossy codec and lossless codec more power to ya. I am sorry for the score of questions and my tone but could some please tell me what I am missing or just blissfully unaware of...