HiFiMAN HM-801 Portable Player / DAC Review: Part One of Two

[Jian]

Oh,come on guys,stop whining about the gapless and eq staff, that's just being compulsive. Concentrate on something more important would you please!? As to rockbox, it is certainly not up to the hm801 but the rockbox developing team.

"As an extreme example, The $1.5m Bugatti Veyron doesn't have the nifty electronics that a $60,000 Mercedes has. You buy a Ferrarri because it's powerful, not because it has lots of trunk space."

Agreed. And that's not even compromising. I guess if we force Fang to add those funny features(especially gapless, what's the point anyway?), it would be Fang who compromises. If you want to drive Bugatti, then you wont care about electronics. And if you care much about the trunk space, do yourself a favor and get a pickup instead of a Ferrari. Why, because it is hardcore vs consumer.


Jude, please give us a bit more impressions before I place the order. Will the first bunch of items get upgrade service, if there would be further modifications with the latter products?

 

[vkvedam]

Waiting for part II of the impressions.

 

[gammelkaill]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jian /img/forum/go_quote.gif Oh,come on guys,stop whining about the gapless and eq staff, that's just being compulsive. Concentrate on something more important would you please!?

NOTHING is more important than gapless IMO. If it doesn't support it, I won't buy if, for sure! I don't think they should even call it "high-end" without that feature - it is just as useless as most other players.

Unfortunately it seems like the developer doesn't understand what this is about. Here is what they answered in another forum:

"Does HiFiMAN support Gapless playback?
Currently, no. Actually we don't think Gapless playback is important, esp. when comparing to sound quality. Never heard of any CD player or Turntable support gapless playback . "

 

[iriverdude]

yeah he doesn't understand what gapless means. If he created CD's with a .5 second gap per track he'd know why it's important.

Prior to Rockbox I had to create single file for a album. Listen to any live or continious album, and you know why you want gapless.

Seems best if he provides hardware to Rockbox and allow them to write firmware for the unit. Things like gapless, wide codec support, self build database, database or file structure browsing are the most useful and features I'd want.

 

[Punnisher]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jian /img/forum/go_quote.gif Oh,come on guys,stop whining about the gapless and eq staff, that's just being compulsive. Concentrate on something more important would you please!? As to rockbox, it is certainly not up to the hm801 but the rockbox developing team. "As an extreme example, The $1.5m Bugatti Veyron doesn't have the nifty electronics that a $60,000 Mercedes has. You buy a Ferrarri because it's powerful, not because it has lots of trunk space." Agreed. And that's not even compromising. I guess if we force Fang to add those funny features(especially gapless, what's the point anyway?), it would be Fang who compromises. If you want to drive Bugatti, then you wont care about electronics. And if you care much about the trunk space, do yourself a favor and get a pickup instead of a Ferrari. Why, because it is hardcore vs consumer.

Wanting gapless is not being compulsive. It's essential.

By the content of your post, you probably don't listen to classical music. It's common for segments of a classical work to bleed directly over to the next, with no pause in sound. These segments can be as large as twenty minutes or as small as one minute.

Like I said before, imagine chopping up your favorite rock or jazz track into three parts and inserting a gap of silence between each part. That's exactly what it's like to listen to Mahler's Resurection symphony without gapless.

 

[swanlee]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Podtweaker /img/forum/go_quote.gif Lack of EQ: The Zune also lacks EQ to conserve battery life. It's a disadvantage, I have to disagree with you here . If you put source material that sounds great on CD(or better yet ripped the source material from a hybrid SACD) it will sound excellent on your Zune if you used WMA lossless. If you are not using lossless why would even bother looking for the highest SQ player. Compressed files will not sound appreciablly better through higher resolution playback equipment then they will through stock DAPs. How about if we put this EQ issue to rest! If having to use EQ is a must have you don't have to be concerned w/ having elevated SQ capabilities of this degree(It seems I am repeating myself quite a bit, as I am trying very hard not to offend people who may not be getting what is obvious to some of us)

The New Zune's lack of EQ is why I did not purcahse one, I have the older zune30 which has EQ presets and upgraded the hard drive in to 100Gb rather than lose the EQ.

My Wife has a newer zune and my older Zune sounds better when the EQ presests are on than my wife's with no EQ.

No matter how good this unit sounds it CAN sound better to a wider range of people using a wider range of headphones if an EQ is present especially if the EQ is enabled in the digital realm where no SQ loss will happen.

 

[dfkt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jian /img/forum/go_quote.gif As to rockbox, it is certainly not up to the hm801 but the rockbox developing team.

http://www.head-fi.org/forums/5685629-post46.html
http://www.head-fi.org/forums/5686524-post49.html

Seems those misconceptions about Rockbox porting still linger on.

 

[GreenLeo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeterDLai /img/forum/go_quote.gif I'm not sure what kind of FLAC files you listen to but most of my FLAC albums are much smaller than 2GB, more on the order of 250 to 500MB.

For 16/44.1 PCM coding, 1 min takes 10MB. A 65 mins CD takes 650 MB. A 32G SD takes about 50 CD if the files is in WAV format.

 

[GreenLeo]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jude /img/forum/go_quote.gif And about that performance: To the best of my knowledge, there is currently no other portable product like the HM-801 on the market. Keeping in mind that the heart of of the HM-801's DAC section contains the PCM1704 DACs (and its output section the OPA627's), you simply cannot compare an iPod to it--unless that iPod is docked in a Wadia iTransport, and that in turn is feeding digital to a phenomenal outboard DAC. The preorder thread has already been posted, and can be found by clicking here.

Jude,

Can you give an example of your idea of what a phenomenal outboard DAC is?

 

[Jian]

Classical live music and none stop rock, I do listen to them. Gapless is not essential for me, but now I can see that why people wanting this. Didn't occur to my mind though, sorry about what I said (compulsive etc).

 

[nc8000]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenLeo /img/forum/go_quote.gif For 16/44.1 PCM coding, 1 min takes 10MB. A 65 mins CD takes 650 MB. A 32G SD takes about 50 CD if the files is in WAV format.

And then flac cuts at least 1/3 of that. On my 40 GB H-140 I have about 100 cd's in flac.

 

[Jian]

Quote:

Originally Posted by dfkt /img/forum/go_quote.gif http://www.head-fi.org/forums/5685629-post46.html http://www.head-fi.org/forums/5686524-post49.html Seems those misconceptions about Rockbox porting still linger on.

I C, but one thing I want to ask, does everybody here want rockbox (or even know what it is)? Or let's put it this way, is the rockbox the best playback sys? If not then it shouldn't be default sys on this DAP. But it is always good to have choices, and it wouldn't be bad to be able to use rockbox on hm801.

 

[KONAKONA]

Quote:

Originally Posted by GreenLeo /img/forum/go_quote.gif Jude, Can you give an example of your idea of what a phenomenal outboard DAC is?

Methinks jude died, he would have made part II by now if he was alive.

I remember one time I ripped a CD at 48hz wave or something weird like that and it came out to 1.4gb per CD.

 

[trondis23]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Jian /img/forum/go_quote.gif I C, but one thing I want to ask, does everybody here want rockbox (or even know what it is)? Or let's put it this way, is the rockbox the best playback sys?

I don't know Rockbox, I have just read about the nice features it has. So if it works, that is what we would like to have in an audio player.

The best playback system I have used is a program for Windows Mobile phones or Pocket PCs, called Phantasm Music Player. I use it every day on a Dell Axim X51 PPC. Today the program is called PhantasmX, and is unfortunately only available in the US. This program supports perfect gapless playback with LAME or iTunes MP3s, iTunes LC AAC, plus lossless formats like ALAC, FLAC and WMA lossless. In addition it has professional quality parametric EQ, reverb effects and xfeed, it has low battery consumption, a nice tag-based library system, lyrics support, album art and more. It is the only audiophile quality program for Windows Mobile that I know of. So if HiFiMAN had these features it would have been a winner.

 

[ericj]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Agentred /img/forum/go_quote.gif Lack of EQ: The Zune also lacks EQ to conserve battery life. It's a disadvantage, but what's the point of buying a 'warm' amp or 'roomy' headphones if you're just gonna use EQ to cancel those defining characteristics?

The zune 80 lacks EQ because microsoft chose a combination codec / power manager chip (wm8350) that lacks a hardware EQ, and they didn't feel like adding software EQ. Admittedly a software EQ would maybe affect battery life. It really depends how fast the cpu has to be scaled for a given codec and how many additional cycles it takes to run the eq filter - but it's more than just possible, rockbox has a software eq on many platforms.

I think they went with the wm8350 so they could drop part of the support chipset for the mx31l SOC and have one less chip on the board.

As for the hifiman itself, i have two things to say:

It'll have to sound GREAT and be very easy to use to make up for the shortcomings.

All the good chips in the world can't make up for poor design. we have no idea at this point how good the device is - it could be great, and it could be mediocre.

I really don't know what to make of most DAP sound quality opinions because i keep reading things like "My favorite DAP has the best SQ of any except for the persistent hiss that never goes away" or "My favorite DAP has the best sound except that i can hear the harddrive servo and backlight inverter through the headphones".

I've recently begun to try to convince myself that maybe while I've got so many DAPs i should try actually measuring the SQ. Nobody seems to do that - or if they do, there's very little talk of measured performance of DAPs the way there is of PC sound cards.