Not happy with the audio capabilities of your smartphone? There’s a cottage industry for portable music players with audiophile-quality hardware. The Neil Young-backed PonoPlayer is one of the cheaper options, with a $399 price tag. Astell & Kern sells some models that cost thousands of dollars. And earlier this year Sony introduced a $1200 Walkman.
By those standards, Pioneer’s new Android-powered XDP-100R audio player seems like a bargain: CNET reports it’s priced at about $700.
At least that’s how much it will likely cost in Japan. It’s not clear if Pioneer plans to sell the XDP-100R in other regions.
What you get for your money is a portable media player that can support lossless FLAC and WAV audio at up to 384 kHz/24-bit resolutions as well as DSD audio.
All of the audio circuitry is on its own board, in order to minimize interference from the primary system board. The case is made of aluminum, and there’s a 4.7 inch, 1280 x 720 pixel touchscreen display on the front of the angular case.
The media player has 32GB of built-in storage, plus dual microSD card slots. Pop in two 128GB SD cards and you’ve got 288GB of storage.
The Pioneer XDP-100R runs Android 5.1 Lollipop software, so you can use it to stream music from Google Play or Spotify… but if that’s all you plan to do with this device, you’d probably be better off using a normal smartphone.
via The Verge
Wimp/tidal offers lossless on their streaming platform, so I wouldn’t be so dismissive about that kind of use. Obviously you’d fill up those memory cards with offline storage when on home wifi.