There might be no short of portable audio players in the market these days but for the audiophiles crowd, their choices are usually quite limited. It is understandable though since there are not much products out there that are able to deliver the level of audio quality that this particular group of users demanded.
So, this is where the Calyx M High-Resolution Audio Player comes into the picture.
Built by South Korea’s Calyx Audio, Calyx M Personal Audio Player was first officially introduced to the world at CES 2014 earlier this year. With an aluminium chassis that is draped in brown color, it is hard not to notice that the Calyx M is thicker than your usual MP3 player although at 230grams, the device is certainly not as heavy as one might think.
Running on a 625MHz ARM Cortex A5-based processor, Clayx M is also equipped with ES9018K2M Digital Analogue Converter by ESS Technology which apparently has quite a good reputation in the audiophile scene. The device also features 4.65-inch OLED display with a 1280×720 resolution, alongside 64GB built-in storage.
If that’s not enough, users are able to expand Calyx M’s storage via its SD and microSD slots which support a total combined storage of up to 384GB. The power juice for Calyx M is provided by a 3100mAh battery in which apparently able to last for around 7 to 10 hours of playback time.
Naturally, Calyx M is able to support plenty of digital audio format out there. We are looking at the usual suspects such as MP3, MP4, MP4A, OGG, AAC, AIFF, AIF, ALAC, WAV, and FLAC as well as audio enthusiast’s favourites including DSD64, DSD128, and DXD. In addition to that, the device is also capable of handling sample rates of up to 384 kHz and audio bit depth of up to 32-bit.
Outside of its portable duties, Calyx M is also able to operate as an asynchronous USB DAC for PCs that are running on either Windows XP, Vista, 7, or 8 as well as Mac OS 10.6 or above. What this mean is that Calyx M is capable of taking over audio playback duties from your PC’s sound card.
Moving on, the Calyx M is also equipped with M:USE user interface which is a proprietary UI that was develop by Calyx Audio itself. In general, Calyx M’s UI is quite straight forward and pretty easy to operate although it does feel sluggish on the device that we used for this brief hands-on session.
As eager as we might be, it was quite unfortunate that we were not able to test the sound output of Calyx M as our encounter with the device was rather too brief. Nevertheless, you can actually test the sound yourself at Jaben Malaysia’s outlet in SS15 Subang Jaya and Nu Sentral Kuala Lumpur starting from this coming August. Given its RM 3,800 price tag, you as might as well come to test it out personally before you are fully committed to it.
Calyx M High-Resolution Audio Player is also available through Jaben Malaysia’s online store.
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