HiFiMan HM-601 Portable Player

Benefitting from an ultra-pure sounding NOS non-oversampling DAC design, HiFiMan's HM-601 is a warm, natural, and musical sounding player. If you crave audiophile quality sound in a portable digital audio player, but your mass market portable just doesn't cut it, the HM-601 is the digital device for you. And it doubles as a quality headphone amp. "What the HiFiman HM-601 does, it does extremely well," reports LFF in a HeadFi.org review for November 20, 2010. "It's musical and all types of genres sound fantastic on it. The headphone out is powerful enough to power some of the most power hungry headphones out there and the line out allows for even more flexibility should one need it." The HM-601 uses a Philips TDA1543 monolithic integrated dual 16-bit DAC, which Audiogon.com reports as having "a very analog or vinyl like presentation." It has a very similar sound to its bigger brother, the HM-602, because these two players share same DAC and headphone amplifier circuit. The HM-601 has slightly better bass extension than HM-602, and a little less sweetness and smooth texture in the midrange and high frequencies. The HM-601 incorporates an onboard 8 Gb flash memory for storing your digital audio files. With its two-position high/low gain switch, it can drive most headphones.