[scootermafia]

So, I got my S:flo2 today. Just some very quick impressions, photos and full review to follow.

Quick refresher for those of you who don't know what this is. It's an all-in-one Chinese-made music device that is iPod sized with a flash card slot and 8 gigs or 16 gigs of built in memory. It plays all manner of music including flac (no ALAC or WAV yet, curses...) and practically every format of video up to 720p. It has dual Wolfson WM8740 DACs, comparable to mid-priced, nice home DACs like the Cambridge DACMagic. It has a dedicated Philips NXP chip for headphone driving, and dual OPA2604 burr-brown opamps for driving its dedicated line out, making it a nice source to drive headphone amps with. It only costs about $130-150 for the 8gig and about $40 more for the additional 8 gigs.

I bought the 8 gig, but with the 16 gig model and the memory card slot (Transflash MicroSD) you can pump it up to 32gb or more.

- Good size, about the size of an iPod classic. Screen is big and bright. Not especially heavy, but with a sturdy metal body
- Small user manual, iPod style packaging (well packed), good customer service from MP4Nation, comes with a charger, USB cable, and cheapobuds and that's about it.
- Touch screen is pretty twitchy and takes skill to operate, lots of unwanted clicks - I will be installing firmware 1.2 soon. Not as refined as iPhone, but it is a capacitative screen as advertised
- UI is fine, easy to navigate. If you sent the font to the 4th option and smallest, with the black skin, it looks pretty good, less like it just got dragged out of the Chinese market.
- Sound quality is very clean and dynamic. It has plenty of power through the dedicated headphone port, when it is maxed the HD600s are loud enough. With the dedicated line out and my iBasso D2+, sound is much more punchy and intense. With the Etymotic ER4Ps and the headphone out, the sound is perfect - plenty of bass and detail.
- Easy enough to load up with music - you plug it in via a mini-USB cable and it mounts like a hard drive, drag and drop the files on. Installing the firmware will be a bit more challenging.
- No noise through the headphone out with IEMs, I have a very quiet classical piece to test this...
- Overall SQ is extremely good, possibly better than my D2+ with USB from my laptop.
- I'm too lazy to break the HD800s out, they need their portable cable plugged in. Their balanced cable is not-so-portable, if anyone here knows what I'm packing

 

[prone2phone]

''possibly better than my D2+ with USB from my laptop'' - thats unbelievable man

 

[scootermafia]

Both are well implemented and it's close. But this is a flac transport/dac where you get just as good of sound as a laptop system, but pocket sized...hell it even has 2 of the dac chips for better stereo separation/SNR (in theory) - the 8740 is a stereo dac and the pico and D2+ to my knowledge have one each.

 

[mesasone]

Hows the battery life?

That's a fairly impressive player by the sounds of it.

 

[Inks]

Wish they had a 32gig

 

[scootermafia]

Battery life remains to be seen, probably not good. It's got a shatload of chips inside. You can pump it up to 32gb+ using a 16 gig transflash card.

 

[drgnfang]

More pics of the UI? Sounding great overall, thanks for the overview (and eventual full review)!

 

[scootermafia]

I will take a small vid maybe and post it somewhere, not sure if I want my ftp getting wtfpwned...

 

[Kees]

Looks absolutely great, congratulations!
One small question, I can't figure out if this is the same or similar to the Teclast T51? Or is it a completely different animal?

 

[SoupRKnowva]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kees /img/forum/go_quote.gif Looks absolutely great, congratulations! One small question, I can't figure out if this is the same or similar to the Teclast T51? Or is it a completely different animal?

its the exact same thing, just with a different boot animation and nationite badging.

 

[piotrus-g]

how about navigation between Sd-card and internal memory?

 

[chengdude]

Quote:

dual OPA2604 burr-brown opamps

That should read "an OPA2604 burr-brown opamp".

Quote:

One small question, I can't figure out if this is the same or similar to the Teclast T51?

Same.

 

[fatman]

It is very similar to T51, for if you want , if you also can OEM from Teclast too. I hope the brand holder can make the original brand clear to let us know where it comes from. We don't want to wast time to suspect and cost time to read the same contents of T51.

 

[Booda]

The picture shown it seems every easy to be stained with fingerprints. It is a bit annoying.

 

[qusp]

get rid of that 2604 first chance you get and it'll sound considerably better through line out. I dont mind the 2604, but better could be had. dont suppose its socketed?
al the same I have been interested in this little thing for a while, given the low price I might have to check it out. I might wait for the software to mature a bit more first though. or for rockbox to be released for it