Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!!!!! I'm tired of all the pros and cons, everything has these. Function over form is what I'm interested in and it is my personal opinion, after months of constant use, there is no other portable player that can give me what the Colorfly can. It is an incredibly high resolution player that tells it how it is but it takes time to realise this. Not everyones cup of tea perhaps but it should be taken seriously. Quote from German review - "should take the Colorfly very seriously - especially in terms of its sound performance".
Digressing slightly .... Last week I tried something different (for me at least). I fed the Colorfly into a custom built Amp, no EQ, no Bass or Treble control. Straight in, straight out and the sound was truly Gob smacking! Leads me to ask a question that slightly embarasses me....... What is the point of using head amps on anything that has no TRUE line out? If you have to use the headphone out then surely no additional head amp can improve on the sound quality? Only alter the way it sounds. Sound is not like other things such as, I dunno, an apple. We can see, smell and taste an apple, we know if it's gone bad or not. With sound however we have only that, sound. And, within reasonable techie specs, surely that must be very subjective. I sometimes prefer to listen through a good valve head amp but that does not improve on sound quality, it only changes it. When I was researching speakers in Japan one word kept coming up.... TONE. Why is the Stradivaris violin so sought after? TONE. Any half decent violin can reproduce a perfect note. The Colorfly was designed to reproduce classical music and convey the tone of the various instruments and the sad fact is, most music is not mastered or recorded with the same attention to detail and 'naturalness' as classical. Fact.
As we say in the U.K." Horses for courses"
If you make a playlist some tracks will sound great, some mediocre and some pretty bad. If only one track sounds truly great then you know your gear is good and the other tracks are simply not up to the mark. Sadly, for some perhaps, the Colorfly is very unforgiving of poor recordings. I have to say, my QLS at 16/44 can sound pretty good through a full size system but again it depends on how good the recording is and I wonder how often people forget about this side of things.