curtain
New Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2005
- Posts
- 38
- Likes
- 14
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.
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.