Ra… Ra… Ra… It’s A Bad Romance… A How To…

Check Her OUT! She’s Pretty Amazing!

Here’s her YouTube Tutorial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHVOxhEpjp0&feature=topvideos#

Teclast T58

Here’s some Regurge News I noticed from the site PlayerBites at http://www.playerbites.com/new-teclast-t58-first-android-pmp-514/ while looking for some vendors for the Teclast T56 for shopping & info actually!

The Teclast T58 is the first in what could be an offshoot product lineup of Android-Based offerings from Teclast… OR it COULD spell the end of the more traditional offerings like the T51 & T56 who at the firmware level are spiritually in lockstep.

While I do not know what is going on in the House of Teclast, I do know that hetrogenous offerings, and in-house design competition is good to keep things fresh!

This is a good step forward…

As someone who has owned a decent, if quirky, RAmos 1080p offering, then a stunningly gorgeous uprated Teclast T51 manufactured for the end-vendor nationite line of mp4nation.net with an extra 8GB of onboard Flash Memory for a total of 16GB, and a custom Firmware, approved by nationite as the s:flo2

see here: http://mp4nation.net/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1_36_58&products_id=361

I can definitely VOUCH for My Personal Experience with Teclast’s hardware Prowess… And Decent if not COWON-level of Firmware Prowess.

Put it this way. Simple, Clean, Elegantish, Gets Job Doneish, unHideous, and on FANATASIC screens under Good to GREAT glass plates… I’m impressed, by the s:flo2/T51 anyway. I hope to be wowed by the T56, AND by an android offering like this T58 sometime soon!!!

JUST wanted to get some NEW NEWS out there!!!

So without much further ado about the NON Android stuff: Here is the Android T58:

Teclast's First Android PMP offering, The T58

Display is 720p,

Video Formats: H264, WMV9 type Video, MPEG-4, RMVB, and AVS.

Audio Formats: Unlisted. Hopefully, and I mean DARN IT, HOPEFULLY , ___FLAC___ will make it into the mix!!!

I’m also not certain if this has a Transflash / microSDHC card bay, but I’d assume so, don’t hold me to it until facts can be confirmed.

iBasso, Balanced…

http://www.ibasso.com/en/news/show.asp?ID=103

iBasso is preparing a set of Balanced Sepearates. That means, a Balanced Output Portable Amplifier, and a Balanced Output Portable DAC. Whoah, some folks with serious headgear are _going_  _to_  _be_  _happy_ .

Here are some pics:

ENJOY! and Bon Appetit!!!

S:FLO2

So, yesterday, I get my S:FLO2, and as a DAPtist, thats a good thing.

Not just because of the specs, which are available here:

[PLACEHOLDER FOR IMAGE]

…but because of the RAW Sound Quality.

This thing kills the competition from an SQ standpoint…

Here are my personal settings, gleaned from the Clarity v.1.0 EQ Setup for the COWON S9 as can be seen at http://www.thenakedlife.com which is currently hosting a how-to on setting up this EQ Setup and others…

EQ Setup: USER
PlayFX: 3D
User EQ:

• 60 HZ @ 9 (12 for MORE BASS, FYI)
  
• 300 HZ @ 1
• 1    KHZ @ 5
• 3   KHZ @ 3
• 6   KHZ @ 6

—————————————–

One (my current fave) is a “W” wave/curve:

From bassiest frequency band to trebliest frequency band:

Band 1 = 60 Hz range @ 9
Band 2 = 300 Hz range @ 1 or 2
Band 3 = 1 kHz range @ 4 or 5
Band 4 = 3 kHz range @ -3 or -4
Band 5 =6 kHz range @ 2 or 3

: based on an s:flo2 EQ Setup by FLACvest

—————————————

Another very treble detailed “V” Curve is this:

Band 1 = 60 Hz range @ 8
Band 2 = 300 Hz range @ 4
Band 3 = 1 kHz range @ 6
Band 4 = 3 kHz range @ 10
Band 5 =6 kHz range @ 12

: based on an s:flo2 EQ Setup by FLACvest

PLEASE Enjoy

But BE SURE for PROPER line out usage your EQ Preset is set to USER not PlayFX (this option appears and is selectable, beneath the LEFT << button) on the Music Player Screen of the S:FLO2

[PLACEHOLDER FOR IMAGE]

Competition it has Bested (personally assessed):

- Apple iPhone 3G (Unamped // Amped with iBasso T4 // iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

- COWON D2 (Unamped)

- COWON O2PMP (Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

- COWON S9 (Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amed w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

- HTC Dream / T-Mobile G1 (cyanogenmod ROM (w/FLAC support) (Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

- iriver H140 (rockboxed) > SysConcept Optical Interconnect > Optical Channel [WM8740] on iBasso D10 Cobra Amp/DAC combo (Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

- RAmost T11TE (Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643])

AND it was in these configurations that I tested the nationite S:FLO2 (a Teclast T51 w/16GB onboard) :

(Unamped // Amped w/ iBasso T4 // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643] // Bravo Audio Hybrid Class-A Solid-State & Vacuum Tube Amplifier // Amped w/ iBasso D10 Cobra [AD797+(2x) LMH6643] to Bravo Audio Hybrid Class-A Solid-State & Vacuum Tube Amplifier)

T11TE 1080p 5″ HiRes PMP with Flash UI…

NOTICE: Strangely, I suppose due to the full power drain (3 weeks) and subseqent AC plugi-in, this PMP decided to Resussicate itself from the grave. Yes folks, no longer dead, it is back from beyond. With a Reformat/Wipe of the internal TF Card via the System Menu Tool, and a reboot of the Device, it was good to go, it mounted, copied files, and updated, saving data, and rebooted, keeping data… Will test and keep you informed. Sweet.

So I am one of the first folks in the USA with the new RAmos T11TE 1080p 5″ HiRes PMP with Flash UI…

Quite thrilled to have one.

It have a lovely chassis, in magnesium silver, and a gorgeous gloss coat over the Sappire Blue finish with graphics of black lines arrayed in a pattern reminiscent of what appears to be interlocking Dragon Scales… YUM.

Gorgeous FLASH based User Interface, quite warm and inviting… Lots of pretty self-changing wallpapers, and well rendered icons. Text is nice enough. Im sure the next couple generations of PMPs will bring REAL REAL REAL professional looking stuff, not that this one looks bad in the slightest, its just not a COWON.

I hope a firmware update will improve things a tad.

Actually I have to admit to doing a very stupid thing… I failed to copy the firmware and sample files to the hard drive before playing with the PMP…. and ended up trying the “Wipe Internal TF Card” feature and oopsie, bye bye to said data… darn.

I’ve already been successful at locking up the filesystem (i.e. screwing it up and making it read-only) and using the Wipe Internal TF Card feature to recover filesystem to a usable state. Successfully. Which is a fantastic facility and feature on this device!!

Lets see… I’ve played pictures of high resolution. flawlessly. Played WMVHD… Looks verrry sharp. and Audio. Well lets talk about that for a second.

It is equipped, the PMP i mean, with a Wolfson WM8988 Audio DAC. NICE! IT SOUNDS FANTASTIC.

Even though it will only give you FLAT audio with no EQ functions, i.e. a nude DAC, it sounds better to my Ear than a COWON S9 with a nice EQ such as Clarity 1.0…

Its just that good.

It plays properly formatted FLAC files, and is quite picky about badly encoded ones. As I found out my WHOLE FLAC library is badly done. MP3 it is verrry forgiving with. Not quite COWON MPEnhance forgiving, but kind enough.

Here’s the few pics I took of it so far:

KOSS PRO4AA Professional Studio Headphones Recables… By ZXAC…

Here are a couple of teasers…

YUM…

Hyper Video Converter…

Using the COWON S9, there’s an H264 video codec thread going on at iAudiophile.net. Folks are posting their successes with this heretofore unsupported codec, which is surprisingly working VERY BEAUTIFULLY on the device, and looks better pound for pound than divx/xvid…

I’m on Gentoo Linux ~amd64 with an default/linux/amd64/10.0 profile as my Operating System.

I’ve got a DVD quality file as source. So, I wanted highest quality settings. I remember that 2000kbit was the max for the D2, and saw the settings listing that in the main H264 thread using them, so I started there. I’ve converted only 5 videos so far.

I’m using the GUI transcoding  conversion program Hyper Video Converter located at http://hypervideoconve.sourceforge.net/. It’s a frontend to: ffmpeg, ffmpeg2theora, and mencoder.

For my current successes and this post I’m posting about the settings and configuration/profile setup for ffmpeg.

The version installed is ffmpeg-0.5_p19928 still in testing as of 10/26/2009. Hyper Video Converter is version http://sourceforge.net/projects/hypervideoconve/files/hypervideoconve/hypervc-0.4.1/hypervc-0.4.1-gtk2-generic.tar.bz2/download , and there are binaries for other Linux Distributions, and even a Windows setup.exe version.

ON TO THE SETTINGS:

I don’t understand all this video jargon and all these miscellaneous video tweaks and persnickety options… I’m just experimenting and happy to get super looking video on a nice device.

EDIT: THE NATIVE RESOLUTION OF THE DEVICE IS : 480×272 .

For 16:9 aspect ratio videos use a resolution of:  480×272

For 4:3 aspect ratio videos use a resolution of:  362 x 272

My new COWON S9. With friends!

iBasso D10 Cobra DAC/Amp, Victor HP-FX500’s, Moon Audio Black Dragon IC, and COWON S9 .:[gladness]:.

Here are the Beauty Shots of my new COWON S9. With friends!

Phonak Audeo PFE 122 with SONY Hybrid Silicone Sleeves…

Here are a couple of “beauty” shots…

Above are the COWON O2PMP with the Phonak Audeo PFE In Ear Monitors adorned with the SONY Hybrid Silicone Sleeves in Large plugged into an iBasso T4 4-Channel High Resolution Headphone Amplifier.

I wouldn’t mind a pair of these… they don’t go down to 4 Hz like the EX700, but…

…they have the S-Master Digital Amplifier. And Digital Noise Canceling. And a STUNNING Metallic Finish. OH THE FINISH!!

SONY MDR-NC300D Headphones with Noise Cancelling and S-Master Digital Amplifier.