H2 HiFi MP3 Player with Bluetooth 5.2, Lossless DSD FLAC Player, Digital Audio Player Hi Res Portable Music DAP Player with 64GB Micro SD Card, Support Up to 512GB

I am a music addict. Although I have gotten used to streaming music off my phone, I still like owning my own copies of records, CD's and downloads. I was an early user of iPods and loved my 128GB iPod Classic when it came out. The problem was that I did not like iTunes and preferred flac files over MP3 or other formats. I recently went on a long vacation where I did not expect to be able to stream music easily or cheaply, so I planned to bring by old iPod classic with me. However, when I bought a new portable speaker for the trip, I discovered that most such speakers are blue tooth only. They don't have input jacks at all. On a lark, I searched for "blue tooth MP3 players" and up came a whole host of products I never knew existed. After reading multiple reviews, I bought a HiFi Walker H2.I was impressed with the size and the quality of the build. It is small, but feels like is solidly built. After playing around with it for a bit, the controls became fairly intuitive. At first, I was disappointed that I had to scroll through all of my music alphabetically which took forever to get to groups at the end of the alphabet. Then I discovered that if you looking through your music in the "Category" menu, you can simply hit the "M" button and the alphabet will come up on the bottom of the screen. You can then go from A to Z to narrow your artist or album search to the specific letter in the alphabet.Initially, I downloaded my entire music library in MP3 format so it would all fit on a 256GB micro SD card. However, I really wanted to figure out a way to put all my music in flac format on the player. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts, I was not able to narrow my flac library down to fit on a 256GB card. On a lark, I bought a 512GB card and downloaded my flac library on to it (about 384GB total). I then popped the card in the player and let it update the library from the new card. Voila! It worked. I now have my entire flac library on the player with plenty of room to add more music.The sound quality is amazing on good headphones (B&W's), and I was blown away the first time I plugged the player into the jack in my car. Wow. It also sounds great on my Bose blue tooth portable speaker and worked great on my extended trip. It sounded okay on a cheap pair of blue tooth ear buds, but I blame that on the ear buds and the fact that I was listening to my MP3 library, not my flac library.The price can't be beat either. Who would have thought that you could buy a better quality, higher memory capacity and iTunes free music player for this price.Nice job. I am a very happy customer.UPDATE: Since loading the 512 GB micro SD Card, I realized something important. The player will recognize and play all of the music on the card in the "Explorer" mode. However, you cannot quickly scroll through the list of folders in this mode. All of the music cannot be seen or played in the "Category" mode. This is the mode that sorts the music by artist, album, song, etc. The Category mode apparently has a ceiling of 15,000 songs. This is the mode that allows you to quickly scroll through the music by letter if you push and hold the Menu ("M") button. I also discovered that when you disconnect the player form a computer, it re-analyzes the library for the Category mode and doesn't always discover and list the same albums. It seems also random which artists/albums it includes in the Category list. Nevertheless, it is still good to know that it will play an entire 512GB card even if it can't/won't categorize all of that music. In reviewing other players like the HiFi Walker touch and the Surfans, it appears they have the same limitations.

With a few tweaks, this could be the perfect price/performance ratio in a lossless portable audio player.The Good:For a device this inexpensive, it has a much better than average sounding DAC handling the decoding. It is good enough that the quality of the cables you use will actually be a factor in the sound quality. Use high-quality cables if you plan to connect this unit to an amplifier. Also, use a clean amplifier with low distortion levels and a decent reserve of power for transients. This player can push the full dynamic range of your recordings to the amp. If you're looking for a good, yet relatively inexpensive micro-amp, this pairs really well with an SMSL AD18 for driving a good set of speakers. It also successfully connects to that amp using Bluetooth, but I recommend high-quality direct cabling if possible. Even with the advances in Bluetooth recently, I still find the quality of the output superior when directly cabled. It is also nice to have decent navigation controls and a built-in display on such an inexpensive, yet high-quality music player. The built-in lithium-ion battery with a standard USB charger makes it easy to keep this player charged. The standard USB cable means it can be charged by all those high-capacity rechargeable portable battery packs that are commonly used by campers, hikers, or anyone else who hates being tethered to a computer or AC outlet.The Bad:The display is tiny. It is difficult to read the text for anyone with less than perfect vision. They allow you to choose to display album art, but they only display it as a microscopic icon in the upper right corner of the already too tiny playback screen. Despite the album artwork being so small, the rest of the display during playback is mostly wasted by displaying "wallpaper" rather than useful information large enough to actually read. I would have been much happier to have a larger version of the album art or a song list displayed in that huge space. Then again, you won't want the display powered on most of the time anyway, because it drops the battery life significantly.Then there is the Bluetooth. It is extremely flaky to pair with various devices. For example, I own two Denon receivers which were made and purchased within a couple months of one another. One of them will pair with this player. The other will not. I tried everything I could think of to increase the likelihood that it would pair, going so far as to pull out my entertainment furniture and climbing behind it to hold the device 12 inches from the antenna. I also discovered that it would only pair with one of my four micro-amps which have Bluetooth interfaces. That amp was the SMSL AD18 I mentioned earlier.Overall, I really like the high-quality output of this budget-friendly lossless audio player. I also like the compact size and the music library navigation features. If they could improve the display and fix the Bluetooth to work with more devices, this would be the perfect first player to purchase for lossless music playback. As it exists now, it is still a good value with a couple of annoyances which may or may not matter to you. Those annoyances cost this device a star in my review, but many would likely overlook the shortcomings because of the price/performance ratio. The player does sound great, after all. That may well be enough for most people.One Tip:When you add a really high capacity microSD card to this device, it may have trouble using it. I used a 256GB card and what I discovered was that I needed to connect the music player to my PC in "USB mode" not "PC DAC mode." Once connected, I could access the memory card inside the device just like any other thumb drive. I used this configuration to format the memory card while it was inside the device. This was insanely slow, so I suggest running it overnight while you sleep. Once completed, I have had zero problems reading any files copied to the device. I actually used the same method to copy the files, which again, was crazy slow. But since you only do it once, I figured having the same device write the files which was going to be reading the files would be the best way to ensure trouble-free usage. So far, I've been right.UPDATE:I've been using this player a lot since purchasing it. At this point, I have even used it with headphones. (I only sent the output through amps before that) I'm still blown away by the sound quality coming out of this unit. Using the amazing TI PCM5102 Burr-Brown DAC, the sound quality compares favorably to many of the $600+ units those big-name companies are selling, but at a fraction of the cost. Even when listening to music using my admittedly mediocre earbuds, the sound quality remained amazingly good. Also, since my original review, I have found a few more devices which pair with the player, but most still don't. Plus, I discovered the large empty space on the display will display song lyrics if you have copied lyric files into the folders where each individual album is stored. The few annoyances I noted originally remain, so so there is no change in my 4 star rating. If fractional stars were allowed, I might give it a 4.5 just for the amazing sound quality at this price point.