At the time of all-streaming and super-powerful smartphones, the music player has not had its last word. With the Music Boy, a new audiophile player with a deliciously retro handheld-console look, retro gaming nostalgia meets the demands of high fidelity.
Endangered because of smartphones and [abc]streaming[/abc], portable music players are trying to resist by becoming remarkable in every respect. From the legendary Walkman of the 70s to the iPod, which peaked at the end of the 2010s, this device enjoyed its decades of glory before being eclipsed. To hope to appeal to the public today, the Music Boy is banking on a geek aesthetic combined with formidable sound performance.
Hidizs AP30 Music Boy: the player designed for audiophiles
There still remains, however, an irreducible village of audiophiles who swear by audio quality alone, and it is for them that the AP30 Music Boy was designed by the Hong Kong company Hidizs. The product of a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the device is equipped with a Cirrus Logic CS43198 DAC chip, supported by a RT6863 amplifier and a RKNANOD master processor, for a signal chain that delivers 137 mW per channel in balanced mode, with a signal-to-noise ratio of 127 dB.
Music Boy player: an impressive Hi-Res technical spec sheet
So it’s a heavyweight, naturally with a [abc]Hi-Res Audio[/abc] certification, native [abc]DSD[/abc] 256 decoding (11.2 MHz), and compatibility with lossless [abc]Flac[/abc], APE, [abc]WMA[/abc], [abc]Wav[/abc], [abc]Alac[/abc] and DSDIFF formats. In addition to the [abc]USB[/abc]-C port for charging, there is a micro-SD card slot (up to 256 GB) and two jacks: 3.5 mm and 4.4 mm balanced. Rare for a device of this size (68 x 53 x 17 mm).
The icing on the cake is that the Music Boy looks like a small GameBoy console, and includes in its (proprietary) OS a few simple little games, among them a Tetris-like clone of course.