Hi!

Got my Clix2 8GB recently and enjoying it a lot, even though it was terribly expensive. I am wondering if I made a wrong move not waiting for the LPlayer, which does not look as good as the Clix2, but it seems to offer the same features like the Clix2 for way less money.

Technically what are the differences between the two?

Thanks!

Matthias

Cheaper hardware, smaller screen, lesser battery life, no theme, minor functions missing - it is not what I 'll call 'same features for way less money'. In fact, you pay less cause you get less.

The only plus side is it plays FLAC.

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Playing FLAC is pretty awesome though, I'd really like to have that on my Clix !
The L-player still seems like a good value -- A lot of features for the money, just like the Clix.

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The first LPlayer reviews are out, although most are very brief. It's not getting panned like the E100 was, but the consensus is that it doesn't raise the bar on sound quality. AFAIK, no-one has yet said whether it has the same Telechips TCC7801 weakness with Ogg Vorbis decode as clix 2. I would like to have FLAC, but this is probably not my next player.

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Clix 2 8GB Red Line Zen Touch 20GB
Shure SE530 Shure E2C Creative EP-630

Hi!

Thanks for your reply! What would be the Clix2's weakness concerning OGG? Most of my songs are OGG and I have no problem whatsoever playing them back.

Thanks!

Matthias

I too have mainly Oggs; they sound a lot better than MP3s at the same bit-rate, and they play fine. The only problem is the extra hiss that the clix Vorbis decoder generates (which I now understand to be a bug in the TCC7801 - although I didn't know that when I bought the clix). It's quite obvious with ear canal phones, although less noticeable with buds. It's not a disaster, Ogg still sounds excellent, but it does stir memories of ... C90 cassettes.

If you've not noticed the hiss, don't worry about it. The clix is a good buy, even for the arm-and-a-leg it costs in the UK. I expect that someone will take the lid off an LPlayer and reveal the SOC's part number soon. But if LPlayer doesn't sound better than a clix, I guess it doesn't really matter that much which chip it uses.

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Clix 2 8GB Red Line Zen Touch 20GB
Shure SE530 Shure E2C Creative EP-630

Haven't used FLAC, but wonder about the file size. How much bigger are they than say a 192-bit mp3? I've hesitated to go lossless, because I don't want to limit my music collection on the clix too much. If clix came in, say a 32g or higher version, then I'd consider it. But maybe it's not that big of a difference in size of files. Just wondering.

It's muuuch bigger. I saw a FLAC file that was over 900 kb/s (I don't know if they're all that large). That's a lot compared to 192 kb/s, isn't it ? :P Around 4.5 to 5 times larger !
If the bitrate is higher, the song takes more space. The weight of a song is simply the bitrate (in kb/s) times the length (number of seconds of the song). As simple as that.
If you have very little files and you ABSOLUTELY want the best possible quality, then go for it, but it'll use a huge amount of space. Maybe just one album or something.

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I have a couple of albums in lossless and the file size is of the order of 30MB per song, so you might get 25 albums on an 8GB player. That doesn't seem too bad. I would like to be able to try FLAC so that I could know for sure that Vorbis high quality is good enough.

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Clix 2 8GB Red Line Zen Touch 20GB
Shure SE530 Shure E2C Creative EP-630

Well, even though I wouldn't for a second question anyone's decision to go lossless, I for myself don't see any sense in that, be it for mobile devices (which would need less bandwidth anyway because of surrounding sounds) or home stereo. There are so many blind tests out there proving one thing: a decent lossy compression keeps the audio the way it is - listening wise.

But I don't wanna start a discussion about that here Or maybe, why not )

Thing is lossy compression is the way to go in almost all cases, and going lossless is reactionary I think. Nobody doubts that for video, but with audio people feel different because even uncompressed their stereo music seems rather small. But already for 5 or 7 channel music few people feel it has to be uncompressed.

I read once that only 8000 Bits per second go from the human ear to the brain - there is still tons of room for lossy compression

Cheers

Matthias

Having lossless files is purely psychological...
It's like "Yay, I got the BEST possible quality ! Awesome !"

But is the result really better to the human ear ? That's arguable...
I think 320 kpbs is more than enough.

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I am totally with you. At least it's entertaining to hear those rants about compression some times.

I use OGG with quality setting 5 which leads to around 160kbit/s, which is totally enough for my ears. I even looked at the spectrum of a couple of songs, and the filter is subtle (20kHz) and the resolution awesome (almost no blocks at all, which are so typical for bad encoded MP3s).

But then again I am no expert - the OGG encoded songs just sound really good to me. And IF there really is some kind of hiss in OGG decoding on the Clix2 I am not able to hear it, which might be because... well I am mostly riding my bike on the streets of Berlin when using the Clix, and subtle hiss can be missed in that environment

Cheers

Agree, in fact, the price of clix2 is double.