lossless/highres portable players

Morning,

So recently I have got back into music. I went through a decade of not really listening to anything new and recently I have discovered that listening to music has a definite positive effect on my mood.

However, I am totally fed up with the quality of music from my iPhone 6s. I have bought cheap and expensive (£160) headphones that the sound is still pants. I know, I know, I shouldn't expect much from Crapple.

I have read a few stories on here of people being brought to tears by how good lossless/highres players are. I want in on this emotional listening.

I have about £400 to spend.

what i'd like advice on is

a) is it REALLY that good?
b) entry level, what do I need to look for
c) where do I get my highres downloaded music from?

Thanks in advance.

Tone

The Cowon Plenue D is one of the best players out there at the moment imo and only costs between 200-250. Pair that with a decent set of high end earphones and it'll change the way you think and feel about music.

I'm a big fan of the Cowon players got a J3 myself, along with some Shure SE535 earphones, you really do hear notes that you never noticed before.

Cowon usually have really good battery life as well.

Thanks guys,

I have gone for the Cowen Plenue D....

I am going to see what my current mix of headphones sound like on it and go from there.

Thanks for your help.

Tone

You did have another option, to use the iPhone as a transport and feed the digital signal into a Chord Mojo (£400) DAC & Amp, which would have given you a sound unlikely to be beaten without spending a couple of thousand or more and capable of driving pretty much anything short of an HE6.

You don't say what headphones / earphones you will be using and it is these that will govern the majority of the sound quality.

Very happy!

Those Plenue Ds are nice little players.

I bought a Cowon D2, must have been ten or eleven years ago - I gave it to my sister earlier this year when I got a FiiO X1 - it still has a battery life north of 50hrs, even after all this time and god knows how many recharges. Only reason I passed it on was it didn't play lossless files.

Tone1979 said:

Very happy!

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I've owned a few Cowon d2's and d20's they had an option to increase and decrease the speed of playback. Does the plenue?

If you're not happy with your headphone sound quality at £160, maybe you could audition others with a different signature?
The biggest gains are going to be with the headphones.
A pair of headphones will sound better out of my ak jr, compared with my phone. Not a night and day difference that can be found in different tier headphones. Eg tier 1 headphone plugged into mobile phone, still sounds better than tier 2 headphone plugged into ak jr dap.
Hi res music compared to flac, if you can hear the difference you qwill be an extremely lucky individual as I havent found 1 person who could tell them apart (making sure both files are from the same source master). Also most people cannot hear a difference between 320 and hi res when tested in a controlled ab test. Im going to guess that the people brought to tears by the hi res tracks, would've been brought to tears by the 320/cd version of the file. Placebo.

thanks Sc00p007.

I am going to look into somewhere I can try some really nice earphones as I am not going to risk spending £250 (that's the most I can really do) on a whim.

so far, I am really happy, the sharpness of the low, mid and high is astonishing. I am not crying listening to stuff but I am certainly hearing stuff I have never heard in tracks before.

I played my missus her fav tune last night and she was like, where did that #tick tick tick' come from, I was like, that's a high hat... She'd never heard it before.

Thanks again guys.

Tony.

c) where do I get my highres downloaded music from?

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I'd quite like to know this too

If by hi-res you mean 24/96 and above then HDTracks is pretty much it at the moment, although the Pono music store should be on-line at some point (their content reseller got bought out) but if you just mean FLAC then there is 7digital, Bandcamp and a couple more obscure ones that may not even work in the UK.

Your best bet is probably to buy the CD and rip it to FLAC yourself, which is where the vast majority of FLACs originate. I spent many an hour ripping mine at 16x with Accurip verification but obviously, that will only work for 16/44.1 as that is what CDs are recorded at. As for how most people get FLACs at standard or HD, well they use "other channels", which is a sad testimony to unwillingness of the record labels to make CD quality music available in a downloadable format.

Technics tracks is another site. Also your better off going to the hd tracks usa site . Morw choice .Will need a vpn for that.

Do you think that equalization algorithms/options in player to compensate for dac/headphones is really viable in a portable player or does it significantly impact sound quality ? (so you cannot really make up for any deficiencies in headphones or dac)

[I had a dacmagic XS in audition with a MEE matrix headphones but resorted to 'Room EQ wizard' to try and improve this 'bright' dac, which I eventually returned]


There are also some nice 320Kb streaming radio sites, but would need a player that can be connected to a phone to access those (I could not see that Plenue D offers this)

As long as you just cut and don't boost any frequencies, equalising can be effective, I use it with my AKG K702s to smooth out the peaks a bit.

You don't tend to get streaming features on DAPs until you get up to FiiO X7 and high end Astell & Kern class, you're better off using your smartphone as a transport and getting a Chord Mojo DAC & amp to convert the stream and power the headphones.