Ap 100 in my opinion the best solution for the ratio of price / quality. If consider his technical characteristics, he defeats opponents 2-3 times more expensive. It is only necessary to pick up the right headphones because hi has a dark sound. I got an excellent bunch with etymotic er-4p. It is worth pick up the right headphones and you will be very satisfied!
Yeh i bought mine for $330AUD, which was pretty much peak price, and I'm still happy with it's value. Soon after I paid that for it on Amazon it dropped down to around $170USD, far better deal, really I think it's a no brainer at that price (have no idea what it's selling for nowadays)...
If mine breaks I would seriously contemplate buying another rather than trying something new, which is a rarity for me as I have 10 DAPs and would love to add another to the collection lol.
Things it has going for it;
1) Power. At 150g I find it doesn't need an amp, unlike most other DAPs I own. I am a high volume junkie and this thing can play stuff LOUD (with my IEMs of choice).
2) Tactile feedback. Blind control operation is easy due to buttons and not touch screens or touch capacitive controls (urgh).
3) Dedicated EQ and SRC buttons. By far it's greatest strength imo, thus allowing the user to toggle sound signature significantly at a touch of a button, without needing to delve into menus and options! Why oh why has it taken so long to see this on a DAP!
4) EIGHT custom EQ slots to tinker with. Perhaps a bug, there are only 3 User slots, but you can in fact tweak the stock 'Rock, Pop, Classic etc' EQ Presets, which is a another great thing because often we can find with these DAPs that some of these presets are quite good, but the user would like tweak a few of the bands slightly, and now you can!
5) M3U Support
6) Adding Favourites.
7) Lyric Support (.lrc files only).
8) A Good shuffle algorithm (some DAPs do this poorly, this doesn't thank god).
9) OTG Playlist Support
10) USB DAC Feature
11) Line Out (with EQ support!)
12) Came included with a very nice and durable leather case (and silicon ones are available for purchase)
13) Build quality is excellent, the thing is a tank! more than a year on and I have yet to scratch or dent this thing in anyway, it looks brand new!
14) Battery life is still performing very well for over a years worth of use.
What it doesn't have going for it;
1) Weight, 150g is still pretty hefty, but then power seems to come at a price.
2) 10hr battery life.
3) Removing added Favourites seems not possible, a bug never addressed.
4) Adding songs to the OTG playlists is only file at a time, no way to add entire albums or artists (or genres) at a time... a real missed opportunity
5) ID3 Tag Database File Limit. (I forget the file limit from which the player can read from tags, however it IS possible to access ALL your files from the Folder Structure menu (and shuffle all music works fine as well).
6) No Text Lyric support (UNSYNCED).
No DAP is perfect, but this one has been the closest I have had to being exactly that. I kinda wished they had released a later firmware than 075 (which is what I run) to address a few of the things in that second list, but it's still not ruined my user experience too much. Certain things like a dedicated EQ button has become an extremely high priority for me now that when considering other DAPs if it doesn't have this feature I move on to looking at something else!
(having said that however, I recently discovered that with Foobar I can convert files to having a certain EQ FR, therefore permanently altering the file, which (for my purposes) might really help navigate lack of EQ in players in the future.
Too bad the life of the batteries in these didn't have a longer life...not just per charge but you would think that after 2 years the battery would last as long as it did when it was new...I don't know if that is a reasonable expectation or not.
