I've currently got a Red. HiFiMan sent me it for review. I'm agreed with you all on the process for using HiFiMan remote; agreed,it's a pain! I remember last year when I got the Gold one forreview. There was no information out there whatsoever as to how to work it. It was a case of trial and error with another reviewer, @Ithilstone and @TeamHiFiMAN. We went from working under the impression that the card slot was for updates only, to installing HiFiMan remote and going through that process. We found out that ExFat won't work on the HM1000 when trying to put files on the thing. It was a long long time to work out how to do it. That being said, once it's done hopefully it'll never need to be done again, and I learnt that Fat32 was the way forward for music files being read by a DAP - my AK380 was having all sorts of problems before we were told that Fat32 worked best on the HM1000.
I would love for them to be a little more user friendly with the software - I think that HiFiMan have a weakness here. Having said that - I tried the Red up against my Chord Mojo. I always regarded the Chord Mojo as unbeatable for the price in terms of sound quality alone, at least in a portable device. The Red beats it in sound quality. $ for $ the Mojo is the equivalent of $565 in the UK, of course with no extra customs or postage and packaging to worry about. The Red retails at $599, has better sq, bluetooth capability and can store music with it's own sd card. To get the wireless functionality via the Poly the Mojo is almost twice the price of the HM1000 Red. True, it has nothing like the power capabilities of the Mojo and is a major pain to work out all the functionality, but the sound quality arguably makes it worth it.
I would love for them to be a little more user friendly with the software - I think that HiFiMan have a weakness here. Having said that - I tried the Red up against my Chord Mojo. I always regarded the Chord Mojo as unbeatable for the price in terms of sound quality alone, at least in a portable device. The Red beats it in sound quality. $ for $ the Mojo is the equivalent of $565 in the UK, of course with no extra customs or postage and packaging to worry about. The Red retails at $599, has better sq, bluetooth capability and can store music with it's own sd card. To get the wireless functionality via the Poly the Mojo is almost twice the price of the HM1000 Red. True, it has nothing like the power capabilities of the Mojo and is a major pain to work out all the functionality, but the sound quality arguably makes it worth it.
At this level Hifiman should be setting the example, not presenting a half baked product with multiple SW issues. I'm out as I'm not remotely interested in a slave device to a Smartphone.
