HIDIZS AP80 Pro-X MP3 Player with Bluetooth, Digital Audio Player, Dual ESS9219C Dac Chips, 0.0015% THD+N, DSD256 Native Decoding, MQA LDAC, FLAC

I received my AP80 a couple of weeks ago and have been very pleased. I waited a couple of weeks to do this review so that I had time to fully evaluate this player. I'm a bit of a MP3 player collector, having accumulated more than a dozen of these devices going all the way back to the original Rio player. Yes, I know I can stream most of the music I have these days on my phone, but I still enjoy and actually insist on owning stand alone music players. There is still something very satisfying about managing your own music collection of music that you actually own and accessing it anytime, anywhere, without an internet connection, and in a lossless format.Before purchasing this player, my favorite MP3 player was the Sony Walkman NWZ-A17 I picked up a couple of years ago. These days, I do demand an MP3 player that will play lossless music as I am starting to amass quite a collection of FLACs. So, on to the review...First test of a good MP3 player is how quickly it will update it's database. I am please to report that this device does database updating faster than any other player I own, even the Sony. I have 2 music folders that I maintain, one labeled "compressed" and one labeled "lossless". My compressed folder contains about 80 gigs of Mp3 and wma files. My lossless folder contains about 60 gigs of FLAC files. Together they comprise a collection of nearly 9700 songs, just 300 short of 10,000.First thing I did while the device was charging was to copy my music folders to a 256G micro chip, taking up roughly 140G's of disk space. I then slipped the micro card into the player and, without looking at a manual, picked up the device and quickly figured out how to use the wonderful button on the side and how to navigate to the "update database" command. Another sign of a good music player is a good, quick, intuitive UI and this device has one. One of my biggest disappointments in music players I have bought recently (last 7 years) is the crappy UI's most of them come with, the Sony being the exception. The UI on the AP80 is excellent, even with my big fat fingers.After initiating the "update database" command, I put the player down and went to do some small chore elsewhere in the house thinking that it would take awhile to update nearly 10,000 songs. I checked the player after 5 minutes and it was done updating! Much faster than my Sony.I won't be able to review every feature of this player as I don't use them all. I don't use the player for exercising so I haven't used the "Step" feature, and I don't use the DAC externally so I haven't used that feature either. If they work as well as everything else on this player then I'm sure they probably work fine. I also don't use screen protectors so I can't comment on the ones it comes with. I will comment on the silicon cover the player comes with. I love it! Don't bother ordering a separate cover for this player unless you intend to take it jogging and need a wrist/arm band style cover, or just don't like silicon.The main way I use my music players is to shuffle play the entire music collection almost exclusively. I love seeing and listening to whatever randomly pops up or just hitting "next" if I don't want to hear what popped up. It is important to me that the music player does a good job of randomly shuffling. Some players have a terrible shuffling algorithm. This one seems pretty good so far. Not only that, but it also shuffles quickly as the UI keeps up with me quite well.The sound is great, but bear in mind I have old man ears, so I may not be the best judge of that. It's highly likely that I couldn't hear the difference between compressed and lossless anymore, but I prefer lossless anyway.I really like the "Sound Field" adjustment. It does as great job of widening the sound, especially noticable on my favorite Bluetooth speaker, the Mini-Jambox. I've attached a picture of this player next to my Mini-Jambox to illustrate the small size of the player. Also notable is that the equalizer actually works on the Bluetooth connection as well as the direct connection.I've got to say that the combination of the Mini-Jambox and the AP80 makes for a powerful personal listening system. I use it all the time and continue to be amazed at the great sound that comes out of this combination.The advertized battery life of 15 hrs may be obtainable, but I will probably never know. I like looking at the album covers on the screen and also look at the properties of songs alot, which means I am constantly turning the screen on which does drain the battery much faster. What I do know is that this player will play all day at work, which is a little over 8 hours, and will usually have about 20 to 30% battery remaining. This seems pretty decent for such a small device and is similar to what I was getting from my Sony.If I had any complaint, it would be the lack of a "standard" android style charging port. I realize that the USB-C port is probably required for the external DAC use, but since I don't use the external DAC feature, I am slightly disappointed that I have to carry a "special" charging cable around with me if I want to charge the device.Overall I am very satisifed with this purchase, well worth the price. The AP80 is now my favorite music player.

I bought the Hidizs AP80 and a XDUOO X3II player last year. My trusty Sandisk Sansa Clip and Fuse players don't have hi-res screens for album art. Both of these newer players have larger color screens that better show album artwork. Because I purchased the AP80, I eventually received a forwarded question about the Hidizs capacity for files. The customer wanted to know if the player would handle the music files from 3000 CDs. I answered NO, but there is more to the story. I thought I would post my answer in the form of a review with a photo of the Hidizs nearing its maximum index of 20000 songs.3000 CD's worth of songs? I'll assume 12 uncompressed songs per commercial CD. I don't think that this player will handle 36000 songs in its database selection modes (All, Albums, Genres, Artists). But the Hidizs does work with larger numbers of files when in Files mode. In Files mode, you navigate the SD card manually. If you navigate to an M3U playlist, the Hidizs does play the playlist in unsorted or random order.I sometimes use the AP80, but I prefer the XDUOO X3II as my daily driver. Because of the XDUOO lower 15000 limit, I have a little under 15000 songs on a 256GB module. My memory card is about half full and the HIdizs takes about 10 minutes to update the database if I make changes. The Hidizs AP80 displays all of the songs OK from the All mode icon, and they are alphabeticaly listed. Navigation in this mode is cumbersome at best. There is a alphabet bar with tiny letters on the right side of the screen that allows you to jump back and forth between letters, but from there, you'll be slapping the screen to navigate up and down within a given letter.Genre is no better for me, because I only listen to a few genres. When I select a bigger genre with say thousands of songs, the Hidizs AP80 completely halts for five or more minutes then it will display the large list of songs in that Genre. This list does not have an alphabit bar on the right, so get ready for some screen slapping. What is worse and completely unacceptable in the Genre mode is that even after freshly updating the database, when I select a song, an entirely different song from the genre plays.Because of the unsatisfactory Genre mode behavior, I usually manually navigate the folders on the memory card where I have files organized in 22 alphabet groups, then by artist, then by album. In this mode, I have not discovered a player limit to the number of songs, but I don't fill up the memory card because I still like using Artist mode which does not seem to suffer from the Genre mode dementia.I also use relative M3U playlists that I have created with various programs. Although the Hidizs will play an M3U playlist from any directory in File mode, I store these in the playlist directory that gets created when a new playlist is manually created and saved right on the Hidizs. The name of the folder on the memory card where playlists are stored is playlist_data. Playlists created offline and placed in this directory do appear with a thumbnail when the Playlist option from the menu is selected from the Hidizs Favorites menu. These same playlists can be selected by navigating to playlist_data directory in file mode. Small playlists work as expected. Large playlists of 5000+ songs can take several minutes to load the first time. After that first load, subsequent loads are snappy even after rebooting the player. Even these large playlists play each song correctly which saved me from throwing this player in the trash given how it works with genres. My largest playlist is 5500 songs, and the Hidizs will show for instance 2187/5500 when it plays Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys.As an experiment for the Hidizs, I added more songs from my library to the memory card for a total of almost 32000 songs. The Hidizs can see them all in file mode, and as I mentioned can play them from a playlist too. When I go look in Album mode, though, only some of the new albums are listed. I could find the newly added album Crooked Line by Nils Lofgren if I navigated to it in Files mode, but it was nowhere to be found in Album mode after performing a database update wherein the Hidizs quits updating as soon as it gets to 20000 files. All of the songs from that Lofgren album were also missing in the All Songs mode and Nils was missing from the Artist list too. I think the newer Sony Walkmans have a similar 20000 file limit. The XDUOO reportedly does 30000 with a firmware update but my virgin XDUOO X3ii pegs at 15000. I prefer to use the XDUOO because it has two additional buttons (not a touch-screen player).Bottom line: Will the Hidizs handle 30000+ songs? It depends on your definition of "handle".