Audiophile portable player

[deepakgang]

The Pocket HiFi C4 Pro media player from Colorfly has an engraved wood backing and retro brassy front that gives the player a distinctive look, but for the audiophile, it's the quality under the hood that counts.

This music player makes your iPod Classic look kind of wimpy | DVICE

 

[unleash_me]

Looks interesting. Wonder how it will stack up against iMod as a portable source.

 

[vasishta.sushant]

I still feel nothing is as good as nationite s:flo2

 

[Thad E Ginathom]

I'm a Cowon fan.

I suppose mine is about six years old: Don't know about their current range...

 

[iaudio]

Cowon and Sansa are what I would turn to as of now. Good sound, reasonable price and freedom from proprietary bull.

 

[grubyhalo]

Looks very interesting! However, it don't seem like it supports USB audio at this time. If and when it does, it should be killer...

 

[esanthosh]

Oh! There are many of this "audiophile" players around. They all are bulky, low on battery life, typically not as good on UI, low on daily usability and some of them are very costly.

S:Flo2 is the only one of them which is affordable, powerful, flat. One can buy Teclast T51, the original of this re-brand too!

ColorFly is retro looking, weighs heavy, costs an arm and a leg and not as popular even among head-fi.

Hifiman players would be HM-801, HM-602 and HM-601. HM-601 are 'cheaper' around the price of iPods. Buggy UI, not a flat frequency response, powerful amp and generally finds greater acceptance among the audiophiles on head-fi.

Then there's QLS QA-350, the no storage (SD card up-to 32GB supported), WAVE only player with 8 hour battery life. Slightly not as strong in bass, but otherwise flat. I read one remark in head-fi that someone rated Colorfly only next to QA350.

My "audiophile" player - the little Clip+. Cheap, flat frequency response, can be carried in earphone case, can survive a few drops, with Rockbox gets a working parametric EQ, expandable (though other players support this too, so that is nothing special), most of all it's low output impedance. It is not the best player in the world as it lacks the power. With power comes better dynamics and sound stage, a bit better separation as well. Probably, that's what all these 'audiophile' players do. Will get one of them later and try to test this theory out. But, one should read the scientific measurements based review by NwAvGuy to get why I like this rather cheap, mass consumer device over my other 5 players (Cowon S9, iPod Touch 3G, Nanite N2, Creative Zen V Plus, Fuze v1 - which uses a slower Arm processor inside the SoC compared to Clip+, Fuze v2 and supposedly Fuze+ use the same Soc as Clip+ I think - not my words, read the link)

I may get one of those bricks, may be the QLS or get S:Flo2 much later. I too want to qualify myself with an entry ticket into the exclusive club of "audiophiles" than just an outside enthusiast

 

[grubyhalo]

LOL, yeah i understand the 'street cred' flaunted by this player. But, I think this one is spec'ed much better than the rest of the 'audiophile' players with support till 192KHz and the DAC functionality. Ofcourse, once they implement the DAC functionality as well, it should be a pretty nifty little box, I'm thinking. I guess the little Sansa players come right at the top in the VFM stakes though...

 

[Kittu]

esantosh,

You are awesome . Truly thanks to you, I am impressed by the specs of Nationite S:Flo2 16GB Touch Screen HiFi Audio Player .

By the way the stock headphones that came with my Xperia ARC sucks big time, Can you suggest me some model , which does not eat up too much battery while trying to give tight n punchy bass , crisp treble and dig out deep details ? I hope there is one and I get to hear from you .

Thanks again,
Kittu

 

[esanthosh]

LOL, yeah i understand the 'street cred' flaunted by this player. But, I think this one is spec'ed much better than the rest of the 'audiophile' players with support till 192KHz and the DAC functionality

Specs is one thing, actual execution is a whole other thing, y' know . I think it's customary for Chinese to slap whatever the internal chipset supports as the feature of the DAC. A few snippets from the Headfonia review

One thing that we still have to take with these Chinese players is the slow response time from the time a button is pressed to the actual screen change. In this respect, the Colorfly is slower than Hifimans player. A big unconvenience, but I can still live with it. Another more annoying bugs that Ive found with the Colorfly is that with .WAV files, everytime I change tracks, a screen prompt saying Play Error is displayed, although the playback is running just fine.

One thing that Colorfly advertises heavily is the fact that it would be the first player with 24/192 capability. So, I went to test its playback capability with 24/96 files, both in WAV and FLAC format. Surprisingly, the Colorfly was not able to play those files. Short communications between me and my buddy Sem reveals that with all three Colorfly players thats been tested among us, none of them was able to play 24 bit files. I dont know if this is a mistake by Colorfly, but it seems that their 24/192 capability is not native 24/192 capability, but rather, the ability to take 16/44.1 files and upsample it to 24/192 through the CS8422 chip. Looking at the CS4398 chip data sheet reveals that it has a native 24/192 ability. So far Ive only tested the Colorfly with its internal memory, but according to Colorfly, 24-bit playback should work with .WAV files on the internal memory. That is clearly not the case with this C4.

Oh! there's also this comparison of the "heavy weights", literally speaking - Hifi DAP Comparison: HM-801, HM-602, QA350, Boomslang | Headfonia

By the way the stock headphones that came with my Xperia ARC sucks big time, Can you suggest me some model , which does not eat up too much battery while trying to give tight n punchy bass , crisp treble and dig out deep details ? I hope there is one and I get to hear from you

There's so much around. First, we will start from the budget (and hope we don't derail the thread for long). There's my whole IEM listening experience - pick and choose anything from and above Tier-III, something would fit that requirement.

 

[grubyhalo]

Ah well, one more product that promised the sky...

 

[baijuxavior]

Is the Nationite S:Flo2 much better than the ipods and cowons? What will be the price in india?

 

[esanthosh]

"Better" is always relative. Here's a review from someone I trust - MP4 Nation Forums • View topic - Nationite S:Flo2 An Audiophiles Musings. We also seem to share the same belief

I am also of the belief that audio differences between different players take a back seat in the audio chain, the chain being (in order of importance): Headphones > Source Material > Source > Amplification >>> Cabling.

• Bad UI - one of the major concerns
• Low battery life (8 hours)
• Not so great screen
• Irksome daily use (read section on album refresh, though it's an old firmware that he describes, EM interference when screen is on)

And on the other hand

• Very good headphone out, which is powerful, neutral and transparent
• Supports line out

He sums it up nicely in the conclusion

If it isnt completely obvious from the above blurb, Ill hammer this in once more: the Nationite S:Flo2 is not a charge-and-go mp3 player like those produced by Apple and Sandisk. In terms of user friendliness, the S:Flo is somewhere between the absurdly adjustable Cowon players and the non-audiophiles-need-not-apply HiSoundAudio AMP3. To those who are still reading, however, the S:Flo2 offers a plethora of features aimed squarely at maximizing listening pleasure.

If your listening is done with highly efficient earphones, I wouldnt say that the S:Flo2 is leaps and bounds better than the competition, though it is at least as good as any other player I have heard. However, moderately efficient headphones such as Grado and Sennheiser portables (namely my HD25-1, HD238, and PX100) can come very close to reaching full potential with the S:Flo2, which is more than impressive for a portable player. The real strength of the S:Flo2 as I see it is that despite offering certain advantages over the competition when it comes to sound quality, the player is not being sold at a huge premium over other similarly-featured products due to some arbitrary audiophile designation. $160 for a 16gb player with a 3.5 touchscreen is perfectly reasonable in my book. For this reason the S:Flo comes with my utmost recommendations.

Lastly, I thought I would list the features that would cause me to choose the S:Flo2 over competing players, and vice versa.

Pros: MiniUSB (non-proprietary connector), expansion slot, great screen, hardware volume pot, dedicated line out, solid sound quality, plenty of driving power for moderately inefficient headphones

Cons: Audible internal EM interference when touchscreen is active, flaky touchscreen accuracy, poor album art support, has issues with some tags (especially with Flac files)

The highlighted part is why I have not gone for it yet. Most of my IEMs are efficient (barring the odd 64 ohm RE0 and a handful of others) and I have been listening at lower volumes most of the time. Even when compared to my beginner days (August 2009), I think I might have dropped at least 6-8 db lower in comparison for average listening. I know this because I recently got back an IEM I reviewed long back and I found myself listening at much lower volumes (for the same song) out of my Clip+ than stated in my review. So, S:Flo2 may or may not be needed for me :indifferent14:

 

[iaudio]

I would like to second a couple of points that esanthosh has made.

1. Sansa Clip Plus: I too, am hooked to this player. Excellent SQ, affordable price( bargain actually), expandable memory, no proprietary strings, good finish and build, durable and highly portable. Its Achilles heel is slight lack of power and battery back up( just about 10 hours, but I am comparing to players bigger in size).

2. Most of these good players will suffice, unless: 1) you start spending big time on hps or iems, I guess I could say above 100$ atleast if I were to generalise, 2) your hp/iem is not very efficient.

For most iems, including my present favourite the Ultimate Ears TF10( about 200$ street price) the Clip Plus serves as a good partner.

 

[esanthosh]

Thanks, iaudio. I forgot to mention about the battery life of Clip+. But then, these "high end players" don't have much battery life either.

Just for comparison purposes - Since I have IEMs continuously "burning in" in the players. Here's the maximum battery life I could extract (without draining the player completely) with the player on shuffle at average listening volumes for low impedance dynamic IEMs (16 / 32). All of them (where supported) had microSD cards in the slot (Fuze V1, Nanite N2). iPod Touch 3G had all ALAC, Cowon S9 had mostly 320 kbps files, Zen V Plus and Nanite N2 run on VBR files (highest bit rate - don't remember the exact bit rate), Fuze V1 has all FLAC

Creative Zen V Plus - 15 hrs, 30 mins
Nanite N2 - 16:30
Sansa Fuze V1 (Refurb, Rockboxed) - 8:30
iPod Touch 3G - 18:15
Cowon S9 - 35:15 (I gave up at this point)

Clip+ - I have not tested the battery life for a long time. But, here's one from long back.