- A plethora of DAPs
- daps.jpg (87.91 KiB) Viewed 71661 times
(Prepare yourself for a little bit of a read.)
Although I am pretty happy with the sound quality coming out of my HTC One A9 smartphone (I did a lot of research on its audio capabilities before pulling the trigger), it takes a big bite out of my battery when I am not next to a power outlet. My Rockbox'ed 5G iPod is still an option for a dedicated portable music rig, but its battery is not what it was when I bought it 10 years ago.
This led me to a search for a new dedicated digital audio player (DAP) to serve in situations when I do not want to sacrifice phone power. As long as I was going to do this, the new DAP should sound at least as good as the HTC One A9 and the old iPod, and not suffer from short battery life. I also decided very quickly that I did not require hi-res audio support. As long as the DAP could handle 44.1/48kHz 16/24 bit, that would be more than enough.
I have grown rather accustomed to the super interface and functionality offered on the Poweramp app for Android, and if possible, really wanted an Android-based player that could make use of that app, or one that offered similar functionality, but soon discovered (the not totally surprising truth) that pretty much all of the Android-based players have short battery lives. More than 6-10 hours was not in the cards for most of them, which left me wanting more.
After a great deal of research into a wide variety of devices (I looked at products from Onkyo, Pioneer, FiiO, iBasso, Sony, TheBit, Astell & Kern, Shanling, Cayin, and others), I finally arrived at a decision to purchase the Cowon Plenue D as my new portable digital audio player. In addition to well-rated audio performance and excellent battery life (up to 50 hours playing back FLAC files, up to 100 hours playing back MP3 files), this device provides support for gapless playback (this is non-negotiable to me), and comes with a microSD slot to supplement its 32GB of internal storage. There was a great deal of debate on the net whether this model will support microSD cards larger than 128GB, so rather the finding out the hard way, I went ahead and got a 128GB card to bring the storage space up to 160GB total.
This led me to one additional thing I had to just leave until the device arrived: what audio file formats to use. As Cowon had supported Musepack lossy compression (MPC) files in DAPs they released in years past, I was hopeful that its omission from the supported formats list was just an oversight, but alas, MPC was not supported. It was also not made clear in any of the exhaustive information I reviewed before purchasing whether gapless playback was supported across all supported audio file formats, or just FLAC. I went through OGG, MP4/AAC, MP3 and FLAC to see how gapless fared. Unfortunately, it was not supported across the board, but I confirmed that it is supported for both FLAC and MP3 (LAME encoder only - other MP3 encoders were hit or miss). One additional wrinkle regarding FLAC is that although you can play entire album FLAC files with embedded cuesheets to denote individual tracks (my preferred archiving method), the individual tracks do not get properly indexed in the Cowon D's music database.
With this information in hand, I knew that I would need to perform a great deal of re-encoding of my existing music collection to make it work as intended with the new device, and I would also need to figure out a strategy regarding which files would stay in FLAC, and which would move to MP3, since I would not be able to fit my whole library into 160GB of space without compressing some tracks down.
This was when I recalled that I had played around with lossyFLAC a while back, and thought maybe it could see some use here. LossyFLAC (now called lossyWAV by its developer) is a very interesting pre-processor for PCM streams that is able to reduce the bitrate of audio by reducing the bit depth of the input signal (through a process carefully analyzing and dropping insignificant bits using the wasted bits feature of PCM stream formats such as WAV and FLAC), and returning back an audio file that is considered completely transparent at the standard compression setting, while being reduced in file size by close to 50% (averaging around 450kbps), all while being completely compatible with any device that is capable of playing FLAC files. And all this without any compression artifacts, and any added noise remaining below the noise floor. It's like having FLACs at half their size with no meaningful penalty.
After doing some tests with lossyFLAC, I discovered an issue with a subset of my source FLAC that are backups of Minidisc recordings, which are lossy and will have some minor compression residue. These caused the lossyFLAC pre-processing to result in much larger file sizes than hoped, so I made the call to transcode these (the horror) to v0 LAME MP3 (note: I didn't go with 320kbps CBR because LAME applies a lowpass filter at this setting, but doesn't at v0, so should end up being more transparent) as the optimal balance of sound quality and file size.
With all the ground rules set, I also found a few albums that I don't listen to that often, or which were not very high quality recordings to begin with, and relegated these to the v0 LAME MP3 treatment, too. Then, I proceeded to convert my entire music catalog to their new formats. This took several hours of batch processes in Foobar2000, done over several nights. I also had to run another set of batch processing to add album artwork to the newly created files, since I usually do not add art album artwork to my FLAC archive files.
Once all that was done, I copied over somewhere on the order of 900+ albums to the internal memory and the microSD card, and to my joy, everything worked exactly as intended, and full gapless bliss has been achieved. And the sound quality is excellent, so excellent that I decided to treat myself to a new pair of headphones to complement the setup. I did a bit more research and came across an excellent deal on Amazon that I could not pass up: A pair of Phiaton Fusion MS 430 headphones, MSRP $179, street price $149, going for $29.99 (update: The cable became damaged on the first set I bought, and when I contacted Amazon for support, they were on sale that day for $19.99, so I saved $10 through the return/exchange process). The biggest complaint I read from reviewers regarding this model was regarding the lack of over-emphasized, fat bass, which to me meant to me that they had the sound signature I prefer, and would likely be more readily able to be EQd to match my taste.
This supposition proved completely true. The bass is indeed not pronounced when listening to my new DAP with flat EQ (it isn't missing, either, just a little south of neutral), but when I use the excellent Cowon JetEffect EQ system on the Plenue D, and apply one of their BBE settings for headphones, everything gets richer and broader without sounding overdone at all. The soundstage is very full, stereo separation is excellent, and details are articulated cleanly and accurately. It has been said by many a reviewer reviewing a whole host of different audiophile gear, but I can truly say that I have heard things in recordings that I thought I knew very well with this combination that I have never heard before. By that, I mean subtle textures, noises and sounds that had not been revealed in my previous setups are now present, making each time I pull up an album I haven't heard in a while a fun, new adventure.
Presenting, my new portable audio setup!
- Cowon Plenue D digital audio player + Phiaton Fusion MS 430 headphones
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Total price: $248 (Cowon Plenue D - $190, Phiaton Fusion MS 430 - $20, Silicon Power 128GB MicroSDXC - $38)
