The first thing I listened to when I got there on Friday was the Questyle player. It sounds quite OK, but the user interface is for shit (particularly the click-wheel, which barely works at all). Had a brief chat with Brannan; mentioned that I was having a battery life issue with my BTS, and he said he would swap it out for me. Noble not only makes great products, they have a solid grasp of how to make customers happy.If you have a use case for a portable player, you gotta hear the AK Jr. Austell & Kern takes a lot of heat, and deservedly so, for their outlandish pricing, but they nailed it with their new entry-level model. I'm thinking I will go back on Sunday and see whether it can handle a 128 gig card; officially, they say 64, but so does Pono, and 128 gig cards work perfectly in the Pono Player. I'm the biggest Pono fanboi around, but the combination of a more phone-like form factor and Bluetooth could change my mind.I didn't hear the Riva Turbo X at CanJam, so yesterday was my first encounter with it. "Blown away" would be a gross understatement.
More details to come later, but quick winners list for pure sonics. Some have better price/performance ratios than others. Some are ludicrously priced.AK Jr. and AK380 (hated the 100, 240 and all the mk2 iterations of their lineup)
I've been eyeing the AK Jr. hoping that it wouldn't sound awful. (That they used a WM8740 like in the AK120 MKI seemed promising.) Will definitely be looking forward to impressions. If it gets anywhere in the neighborhood of the performance of the GO450 + Leckerton, I'd buy it just for the convenience factor alone.
