dfkt
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jul 20, 2005
- Posts
- 4,352
- Likes
- 115
So everyone and their dog have been feverishly awaiting the arrival of the new Jesus players for audiophiles, the HiSoundAudio RoCoo and AMP3 PRO2, or STUDIO 1, or HAROLD, or whatever it's called. I don't care; I'm too lazy to look up what fancy names they made up to extract some more money from your wallet.
I borrowed the older AMP3 PRO1 from a friend, and I'm speechless that it's actually worse than I thought it would be. A lot worse. A lot.
So the con artists who made that piece of crap allegedly stuck some "Class A" amp in it and called it a day. No wait, I give you the whole marketspeech drivel, it's even more awesome. That hunk of junk has a: "PDAA - Portable Digital Acoustic Amplifier". Sounds super manly and all astonishing and science-y, eh?
Too bad it actually sounds worse than your average decent brand player. I've tested it against the Sansa Clip and the Cowon S9, volume-matched to within 0.5dB - and both sound better than the AMP3, no matter what phones. Well, with IEMs the AMP3 is actually completely unusable, it hisses more than the FiiO E3 or the Minibox-E+. The hiss is louder than on any other player I've ever heard - and that includes $5 DealExtreme players. It hisses constantly, and it hisses and warbles some more when accessing the memory. "Class A", my ass. How about building an MP3 player that actually works, not some useless piece of crap sold with the help of fancy sounding rubbish and lies?
The firmware matches the rest of the stinker. It's something some script kiddie cobbled together on a spare afternoon it seems. The player has extremely slow bootup, a sluggish UI, terrible usability, an awful file browser, and the list goes on. It's almost impossible finding an audio track with the sorry excuse of the braindead mix of ID3 and folder browsing they implemented on the crappy 3-line display. The player crashed on me a few times, and the ripoff iPod Shuffle controls are abysmal to operate. They react to every 3rd or 4th press if you're lucky.
It's plain pathetic, only a true con artist would sell such a piece of garbage for that ridiculous price, and have the nerve to call it an "audiophile" product. I pity the poor souls that fell for all these lies. But then again there's a lot of peer pressure on forums, and rarely anybody likes to admit that they fell for a scam - and so the lies spread. Anyways, enough of that - this player has no redeeming features. None at all, it's all bad, sad, and pathetic about it. Well, the battery life should be nice. No wonder since it's such a brick.
The AMP3 PRO1 is so extremely bad in every aspect; it's the ultimate in "Emperor's New Clothes". Just needs a $500 cryo-treated USB cable that matches the player. But seriously, I hope this writeup serves as a warning to people who are actually considering buying some dubious piece of hardware from some shady Chinese manufacturer with no moral standards (and their European or American strawmen).
Here's my RMAA test of that pathetic piece of junk: RMAA - AMP3 vs. Sansa Clip+. Results aren't even mediocre. I don't think I have to add anything to that.
Frequency response:
THD:
IMD:
Stereo crosstalk:
I borrowed the older AMP3 PRO1 from a friend, and I'm speechless that it's actually worse than I thought it would be. A lot worse. A lot.
So the con artists who made that piece of crap allegedly stuck some "Class A" amp in it and called it a day. No wait, I give you the whole marketspeech drivel, it's even more awesome. That hunk of junk has a: "PDAA - Portable Digital Acoustic Amplifier". Sounds super manly and all astonishing and science-y, eh?
Too bad it actually sounds worse than your average decent brand player. I've tested it against the Sansa Clip and the Cowon S9, volume-matched to within 0.5dB - and both sound better than the AMP3, no matter what phones. Well, with IEMs the AMP3 is actually completely unusable, it hisses more than the FiiO E3 or the Minibox-E+. The hiss is louder than on any other player I've ever heard - and that includes $5 DealExtreme players. It hisses constantly, and it hisses and warbles some more when accessing the memory. "Class A", my ass. How about building an MP3 player that actually works, not some useless piece of crap sold with the help of fancy sounding rubbish and lies?
The firmware matches the rest of the stinker. It's something some script kiddie cobbled together on a spare afternoon it seems. The player has extremely slow bootup, a sluggish UI, terrible usability, an awful file browser, and the list goes on. It's almost impossible finding an audio track with the sorry excuse of the braindead mix of ID3 and folder browsing they implemented on the crappy 3-line display. The player crashed on me a few times, and the ripoff iPod Shuffle controls are abysmal to operate. They react to every 3rd or 4th press if you're lucky.
It's plain pathetic, only a true con artist would sell such a piece of garbage for that ridiculous price, and have the nerve to call it an "audiophile" product. I pity the poor souls that fell for all these lies. But then again there's a lot of peer pressure on forums, and rarely anybody likes to admit that they fell for a scam - and so the lies spread. Anyways, enough of that - this player has no redeeming features. None at all, it's all bad, sad, and pathetic about it. Well, the battery life should be nice. No wonder since it's such a brick.
The AMP3 PRO1 is so extremely bad in every aspect; it's the ultimate in "Emperor's New Clothes". Just needs a $500 cryo-treated USB cable that matches the player. But seriously, I hope this writeup serves as a warning to people who are actually considering buying some dubious piece of hardware from some shady Chinese manufacturer with no moral standards (and their European or American strawmen).
Here's my RMAA test of that pathetic piece of junk: RMAA - AMP3 vs. Sansa Clip+. Results aren't even mediocre. I don't think I have to add anything to that.
Frequency response:
THD:
IMD:
Stereo crosstalk: