Anyone recommend a portable FLAC player ?

[Deckard]

Well finally found a Mac SACD ISO to dsf converter program - traX Audio SACD extractor and it works a treat on files or folders - my old flac Violator album about 280 meg in FLAC, my new dsf one almost 2 gig ! Only problem is I'm gonna need a bigger boat, sorry memory card. Ain't had a real chance to listen much to the new conversions yet but will do over the weekend. I'm also gonna treat myself to some custom in-ear headphones courtesy of http://pro.ultimateears.com for Xmas with a custom paint job. Anyone ever been to an audiologist to have their ears modelled ?

[VNVObit]

how are you getting the iso as thought cd drives couldn't read the relevant layer of SACDs (I have a few)

[Muttley]

I use the SanDisk Sansa Clip for Flac playback and love it. Mine is only 4gb but the new versions have MicroSD slots. £35 from amazon for the player. Assuming you could pop a 64gb card in it.

I saw several reviews saying it was very quiet which put me off as I'm a bit deaf in right ear but I note that the EU vogue cap can be removed .....

That's bloody EU regulations for you. Handily if you do a system reset you can then tell it you're not in the EU and then the volume isn't nerfed. Alternatively you can totally replace the firmware: http://www.rockbox.org/

[Deckard]

how are you getting the iso as thought cd drives couldn't read the relevant layer of SACDs (I have a few)

To be honest - I am nicking the ISO's from a russian site as SACD-R and then converting.

[VNVObit]

have you tried Audirvana? should be able to play the dsf files on the mac(if you want to do that)
currently have my aging mac hooked up to cambridge audio stream magic and amp to play music at home. find I'm playing more music as a result as tend to listen when cooking, etc.

[Deckard]

No this is for my portable setup - my Fiio X5 and Sennheiser IE800

[Firefox]

64GB microSD cards are getting almost cheap nowadays, so I thought I'd get one and give it a go in a Clip+.

No luck! Neither Rockbox nor the original Sansa firmware even reports there's a card in the slot.

Then I reformatted it as VFAT/FAT32 and, ping! It works perfectly.

So now I can have 72GB of tunes clipped to my shirt.

[koogy]

my clip zip (8GB + 16GB) takes about 10 minutes to re-index if i add new tracks. which is tedious. i can't imagine what a 4x bigger card would be like. it's probably a much faster card. and do you have fewer, larger tracks?

(mine has about 5k tracks on it, mostly oggs)

[Firefox]

I use Rockbox for the firmware, so no re-indexing (which was something I hated about the original firmware - as well as being slow, it creates loads of bastarding folders that I don't want or need).

I used to use Oggs, but for quite a few years now (ever since I got my 20GB iRiver hard drive player) I've not bothered and just ripped my CDs straight to FLAC and put that on my music players.

Oh, speaking of Rockbox and Sansa Clips, there's a new model come out recently called the "Clip Sport". That's just a marketing con. Inside it's not even vaguely related to the previous Clips and won't run Rockbox any time soon, if ever. (I suspect that the sound quality's not going to be as good, either...) Beware!

[Deckard]

Ouch 800 quid !! but does look the dogs



Following on from 2013’s ZX1, the Sony Walkman NW-ZX2 (to give it its full name) is a premium product designed to push 24-bit, 192KHz Hi-Res audio content.

That’s audio of a much higher quality than you might be used to from traditional streaming or download sources. In fact, it’s better than CD quality.

In addition, the ZX2 can handle a wide range of established formats, including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC, Apple Lossless, AIFF, FLAC, and DSD.

For the regular ‘lossy’ formats, the ZX2 is said to be capable of applying DSEE HX processing to recreate the high-frequency musical information that tends to be lost in the compression process. This means that CD and MP3 sources are effectively upscaled to sound better than they are.

This is a proper audiophile’s tool, and it’s been built as such. The ZX2’s frame is made from a solid aluminium alloy, while its internal components feature gold-plated copper plate to help boost audio quality. Meanwhile, chunky physical playback buttons occupy the side of the device.

The Walkman ZX2 features a S-Master HX digital amplifier and 128GB of storage as standard, though the latter can be boosted further through a microSD card slot.

It also features Bluetooth and NFC for simple connections to wireless speakers and headphones. For physical a headphone connection there’s a chunky gold-plated 3.5mm port.

and impressions from headfi - http://www.head-fi.org/t/742609/sony-nw ... ayback/105

[adam]

interesting - the price of dac chips has really come down, so 24/192 is not a big deal technologically speaking - that was sacd rate wasn't it?

cheapest 24/192 dac i can see is $0.81 in 5k quantities

http://www.digikey.com/product-search/e ... geSize=100

so i'm surprised it costs £800 - laptop plus usb dac would be cheaper, just about

i suppose it's the early adopter price and they're banking on being able to sell 24 bit mp3's to people, there could easily be 10 years of 24/192 recordings available, i think protools hd was the first to offer that - and sony may have had this in mind for a long time

that said a lot of hollywood cgi was done in 4k but those files have been discarded, so 4k native content may not be around for a while in quantity

[VNVObit]

SACD converts to 24/88.2 (original dsd files are 1bit with very high rates)

Happy with my Fiio X5 plus E12 amp total cost <£500
Only seen 24/192 files on the Linn Records site so not sure how widely available they are

I don't see any connection with component parts and consumer audio devices prices, DACs in particular.the steps up in Quality/price seems to be more like exponential rather than a straight line.
Probably know their customers well

There is a purpose built woolfson DAC for the Raspberry Pi which seems more realistic in terms of pricing (board is around £25 iirc)

[gumboot]

What kind of audiophile is going to go along with this high-frequency extrapolation? Sounds like exactly the sort of thing they most revile, to me. That stuff's for geeks, not audiophiles.

Also, fuck Sony.


I'm not a great believer in >48kHz audio, but I'm also not a great believer in the model that says it should be unnecessary. The problem is that with compressed audio you're locked in to the model and don't get a lot of wiggle room to blend in higher frequencies.

[Deckard]

I have to say that my X5 has wildly exceeded all my sonic expectations. I even like the chunkiness and quirky GUI

[Chontler]

32/384 anyone?

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/geek ... sic-player

tbh, it looks promising and not too badly priced but I really can't stand the name and some of the audiophiles in the vid are a little suspect.