Hifiman Supermini Hi-Res portable player

Rating: 5/5

Review:
Fantastic sound and a lovely object

I was sent this Hifiman Supermini music player for review.  There is still a little work to do on the firmware, I think, but the sound is superb, the build quality is excellent and it is very stylish.

To begin with the most important thing: the sound.  It is quite outstanding, I think.  I have used the player with both the balanced hi-fi earbuds supplied with the player, through which it sounds excellent, and with my pair of Cleer DJ High-Definition headphones, which sound superb with it.  The clarity of articulation is extraordinary, with a full, bright sound with plenty of oomph when needed.  Tops are sweet and crystal clear with no trace of harshness, middles are simply lovely and the bass is beautifully balanced but can really thump you when it needs to. 

I've listened to a lot of music with the Supermini now, including my Test Playlist which I use to compare audio products.  This begins with 16th-Century choral music and ends with The National and London Grammar taking in most things in between, and everything sounds just great.  Individual instruments are incredibly lifelike (I can't tell you how good a viola da gamba sounds, which is a real test) and the articulation is good enough to make every note from those shimmering low strings in Sibelius's Karelia Suite Intermezzo completely clear.  Rock is fantastic, acoustic music has wonderful clarity and air…and so on. Lossless (FLAC in my case) sounds magnificent, but even mp3 at 320kbps is excellent.  It is, in short, top-class sound.

It's a lovely, stylish object with excellent build quality.  It's neat, robust and a pleasure to handle.  The screen is excellent and the display is very informative.  Battery life seems excellent – the 22 hours claimed looks about right to me.  I have used cards up to 64GB without any problem.  (The player will need to format a 64GB card first, by the way.  It's dead simple, but do it before loading any music onto the card.)

The firmware is decent and pretty intuitive and the navigation buttons are good, but it has a couple of little foibles. 
- There is currently no access to the internal memory, so everything has to be on microSD cards and your PC will treat the player just as a card reader.  I know 8GB of extra memory isn't a big deal, but I do have some stuff that I like to have permanently available rather than having to change cards.
- Changing cards is a fiddle.  Once a new card is inserted I have to instruct it manually to update the database, which can take several minutes for a 64GB card.
I hope these can be ironed out with an update fairly soon. Other than that it's fine.  (And after a freeze-up, I can confirm that poking a hairpin or equivalent into the reset hole works perfectly.) 

The package is decent, but there's no carry case of any kind, which I think is a shame, and no printed Manual.  You can download a PDF manual from Hifiman's website, but it's not the greatest manual in the world.  You do get an excellent set of balanced earbuds with a good range of tips, though.

I don't claim to be an audiophile, but I do listen to a great deal of music and I've listened through an awful lot of different equipment. I think this is a bit of real class when it comes to sound.  It's a lovely little object, too.  The minor firmware quirks aren't enough for me to dock a whole star; my rating is 4.5 rounded up, and once the firmware is tweaked and upgraded it will be an unequivocal five stars.  I love it as it is, though, and can recommend it very warmly.