Decided on this ahead of the F20 (recent deal here), but didn't love the price above $260.
$221.24 is an all-time low price according to the three camels.
CamelCamelCamel.
Agree, time to put my FLAC collection to use and enjoy and unplug with an "offline" device.
Bloomberg reports that the [Spotify] cost will go up by between $1 and $2 in the UK, Australia
Yeah, it will pay for itself in only 221 months.
Or less than 2 years if you cancelled your Spotify Premium upon purchase?
Spotify at $12-14 per month, more like 15-20 months
Where does an armature OzBargainer download high quality MP3?
Some artists have purchasable music from their own websites.
In all seriousness, small time/independent artists will generally sell their music in FLAC format on Bandcamp for very reasonable prices.
TPB
Buy CD, burn them and convert to file
Bandcamp is a great place for buying DRM-free music.
Otherwise, use an app like Exact Audio Copy to rip all your CD's.
$ brew install yt-dlp
$ yt-dlp -f 'bestaudio' -x —audio-format best [URL]
With Thumbnail and Metadata
$ yt-dlp -x —audio-format mp3 —audio-quality 0 —embed-thumbnail —add-metadata "AUDIO-URL"
I take it that this is measurably better than android phone with a microsd and an apple dac?
I mean, if you could get an old LG flagship phone, they made those phones with great DAC in mind like the V60.
Have a look at these for those that are interested.
https://www.hypethesonics.com/dapti-database/?LG_V60
Why are people comparing this with streaming services? Not that it comes with free unlimited music.
Spotify might let you stream forever but there are so many blind spots in the catalog, I don't know how people can use it.
Everyone has different music tastes I suppose.
Because "free unlimited music" is not the only criterium when it comes to how one gets and listens to their music.
To me, streaming is great to discover new music - it's so easy.
And then, streaming is useless when you go off the grid for a while and forgot to haven't downloaded everything you may have wanted.
can't put my finger on it but these things are reaching snake oil levels…
Why? Is this comment really the full extent of your ability to articulate and opine on this?
Possibly a silly question, but I have a pretty big CD collection that hasn't been used in some time. If I were to convert them to a lossless format to suit this player, would it be comparable to what the streaming services offer? I've tried Tidal Premium and Qobuz and was pretty impressed with everything but the price.
I'm no CD ripper expert, but I believe CDs do store audio in uncompressed format (PCM) which mean you can rip a CD to FLAC, if you don't want to compress.
just to avoid confusion for anyone new to the game I'm going to point out that FLAC is compression, but its lossless compression. Like a zip file, it exploits redundancies in the data to shrink the storage required without changing or damaging the original data. That's opposed to lossy compression like MP3 which just throws stuff out - but at high bitrates it actually does a very good job of this and you really don't need to worry about it in musical/listening applications.
Yeah sorry, compress with loss I should have specified. Thanks for your comment.
The engineers did a real good job designing CD's, you can absolutely do that. CD's are straight PCM at a sample rate that reaches right to the limits of human hearing.
A "pretty big" collection is going to take forever to rip though - and while I believe that the American's have "digital backup" provisions in their copyright laws, I'm under the impression that we do not - so ripping digital copies of what you own on CD is just as illegal as downloading them.
So up to you which way you want to go, wink wink.
I'm under the impression that we do not - so ripping digital copies of what you own on CD is just as illegal as downloading them.
Don't worry, it's fine:
1. What can you do under the private and domestic use provisions?
The specific private and domestic use provisions allow you to:
• space-shift sound recordings (i.e. copy sound recordings into another format so you can
listen to the recording in different places).
[…]
Section 109A allows for sound recordings to be copied from a physical format to a digital format as
long as the copy is to be used on a device owned by you.
Cool, good to know, thanks.
How is this better than an old mobile phone?
(Not a rhetorical question)
Battery life?
Physical buttons. not android
The headphone output on an old mobile phone would be pretty weak. Dedicated audio players typically have better DACs and more powerful headphone amps to drive headphones. Some, like these, also support balanced headphones.
If you use Bluetooth headphones there'll be no quality difference though, as the DAC is in the headphone.
You can also use this player as a DAC/amp for a computer.
I have the F28, and the F20 and I would argue although the F28 does sound a bit better, the F20 is better value.
I also have a bunch of Sony ranging from 4gb NW's to the newest ZX707's, also Astell and Kern Kann, about 15 MP3 players, and each is slightly different from the other.
The Surfans surprised me with their mids - I absolutely love the vocals which sound more upfront and present on the Surfans than any other player I have. BUT - and its a fairly big caveat.. the bass is weak. Disappointingly weak on both the F20 and F28. Shockingly weak if like me you are somewhat of a bass-head. If you dont care for bass all that much, youve got a winner with the Surfans, otherwise stay well clear, Sony has it covered for bass.
If they only had stronger bass, the Surfans would be incredible value, but for me its really a dealbreaker if you want strong, punchy bass because you're going to be sorely disappointed. Even with an amp it makes no difference to the warbly bass.
How does it compare to Hiby R3 Pro? I'm not an audiophile. :D
With streaming costs going up, im 100% considering