This player may be worth a second look and some background research, on merits of high sound quality, good pocket size, and slightly longer 15 hours battery runtime. Acoustic research may not be well-known in the headphone community (apparently the brand has been around for like 60 years), but a friend of mine who writes professional reviews has the older Acoustic Research M2. Apparently, it has unusually high sound quality, and beats the sound from his other DAPs (including FiiO X5 mk III) and smartphones including the LG series, which it should since it’s a purpose-driven music device.
I have been looking into the AR M200, their latest, least expensive player, because it has a balanced Pentaconn output and I have a cable for that. I got to hold one and borrow it for the night from a friend at CanJam NYC, but it slipped my tired mind and I forgot to give it a listen. For having a balanced output and an amp operating in Class A for most headphone loads, the player was impressively small and pocket friendly. My FiiO X7 isn’t so pocket friendly, it’s very thick and square and you need big loose pockets, not the kind of thing you can ignore when worn.
I’ve only found AR players from a few vendors (M200 only direct from the Manufacturer), and $200 off is a nice deal.
One concern/question I would have about this “bigger brother,” is it running Android to allow for downloading Spotify/Tidal offline music? Some players have proprietary OSes and can only stream, while others like my FiiO have weird partition schemes and can only hold like 20 songs, any attempt to download songs from Spotify to the MicroSD card fails.
Edit Oct 19, 2018: Apparently, they solved this issue by having 2-way Bluetooth. So, the AR players use a Purpose-made proprietary OS, and can be a source to transmit Bluetooth audio out to Bluetooth headphones... but also can connect to a Smartphone with Bluetooth, allowing the user to stream almost any audio from a phone to the high-quality guts of the AR DAP and then play through wired headphones. In this scenario, your phone becomes like a wireless remote control while you can use any headphone with the wire routed where it won’t get in the way (to your backpack, under a shirt, to a pocket or bag that isn’t easy to access). Sony just added this feature to many of their latest DAPs in a firmware update, Shanling players have had this feature for years, and other examples of this feature many exist.
I have been looking into the AR M200, their latest, least expensive player, because it has a balanced Pentaconn output and I have a cable for that. I got to hold one and borrow it for the night from a friend at CanJam NYC, but it slipped my tired mind and I forgot to give it a listen. For having a balanced output and an amp operating in Class A for most headphone loads, the player was impressively small and pocket friendly. My FiiO X7 isn’t so pocket friendly, it’s very thick and square and you need big loose pockets, not the kind of thing you can ignore when worn.
I’ve only found AR players from a few vendors (M200 only direct from the Manufacturer), and $200 off is a nice deal.
One concern/question I would have about this “bigger brother,” is it running Android to allow for downloading Spotify/Tidal offline music? Some players have proprietary OSes and can only stream, while others like my FiiO have weird partition schemes and can only hold like 20 songs, any attempt to download songs from Spotify to the MicroSD card fails.
Edit Oct 19, 2018: Apparently, they solved this issue by having 2-way Bluetooth. So, the AR players use a Purpose-made proprietary OS, and can be a source to transmit Bluetooth audio out to Bluetooth headphones... but also can connect to a Smartphone with Bluetooth, allowing the user to stream almost any audio from a phone to the high-quality guts of the AR DAP and then play through wired headphones. In this scenario, your phone becomes like a wireless remote control while you can use any headphone with the wire routed where it won’t get in the way (to your backpack, under a shirt, to a pocket or bag that isn’t easy to access). Sony just added this feature to many of their latest DAPs in a firmware update, Shanling players have had this feature for years, and other examples of this feature many exist.