Product standard configuration:

Pocket HIFI C4 pro classical version of the player

Immersion Gold USB data cable

Power adapter

User manual

Warranty card

   Pocket HiFi C4 shell wood produced from the North American black walnut, they are the best once the title of Royal walnut. This wood texture is not only thorough, smooth and delicate, glossy, ring clear, and sometimes with wavy or curly tree pattern to form a pleasing decorative patterns. Due to the unique wood grain, each player is unique.

ColorFly C4 is a true pocket hi-fi, the first portable music player to feature 24bit/192kHz playback with a true audiophile design that will properly drive audiophile quality headphones without the need for a separate headphone amplifier. A truly astonishing portable music player, the C4 is also ideal as a main hi-fi source and sounds simply stunning with all variety of suitable amplifiers and hi-fi systems.

Easy to use, simply drag and drop your music files onto the flash based 32GB internal storage space or onto a micro SD card accepted into the bottom of the unit (not included), allowing you to expand the storage space even more. The Colorfly truly is quick and simple high end audio on the go!

C4 is the first portable player that can

1) Play 24 bit/192 KHz audio files 2) Jitter less than 5 picoseconds, 3) Drive 300 ohm Headphones.

Exclusive and Unique Just look at the box the C4 comes in! It's more akin to something offered by a supercar manufacturer or watch maker. Each C4 is unique due to the fact each is crafter from real black walnut wood - regius walnut from North America to be exact. The pleasant vignette is formed by the clear, smooth glossy and wavelike grains and the clear annual ring.

Precision manufactured manually The Colorfly team processes the wood by using a CNC numerically controlled machine at a constant temperature. The design and the special curve on the wood is engraved manually as shown, making the C4 a true luxury product. The C4 is special to look at just as importantly it feels special to hold, giving it special and unique pride of ownership.

Reviews

Nominee "BEST ACCESSORY" (Hi-Fi Choice Awards 2011)

''You'll already have noticed from the photos that this is one smart-looking baby. In fact, in the flesh it's simply gorgeous with its solid walnut body. It's bigger than other portables, but still fits in a jacket pocket and feels fabulous in the hand. Internally, it's built with the sort of parts you expect to find in high-end CD players and DACs' (Hi-Fi Choice magazine May 2011)

'And the sound? There's no doubt that this is a whole different ballgame of portable sound. We took advantage of the higher-than-usual output levels and confucted quite a lot of listening with Grado's fabulous GS1000 headphones...it drove with a combination of grip and sweetness that really does make for a high-fidelity experience' (Hi-Fi Choice magazine May 2011)

'As a component in a domestic hi-fi set-up, the Colorfly also makes a very good impression. Whether playing its own files or acting as a DAC, it achieves performance results that would embarass a full-size component of similar price or indeed rather higher' (Hi-Fi Choice magazine May 2011)

'Clear, detailed and simply captivating sound...in a field of one as an audiophile portable. It also achieves wonderful things in a fixed system' (Hi-Fi Choice magazine May 2011)

The Famous DAC The excellent sound quality and support for 24bit/ 192kHz is possible thanks to a single Hi-Fi DAC (Digital-to-Analogue Converter). The ColorFly team decided to use the CIRRUS logic CS4398, a high-end chipset usually only found in top-of-the-range Hi-Fi components costing many thousands of pounds. This DAC offers outstanding levels of performance with excellent dynamic range up to 120dB and the ability to decode 24bit/192kHz audio for stunning sound quality.		A Touch of Volume Nostalgia Colorfly used the flagship series pro-audio series of the famous ALPS volume potentiometer in Japan. The dust cover and grounding connection were ordered according to the specifications of the Pocket HIFI player. The rate of the volume error was lower than 5% in average after 1,000 hours. The volume error rates of the C4 was 15% lower than the ALPS official data.

Specific Signal Path

C4 aims to offer hi-fi quality audio from a portable player no larger than the size of a cigarette pack. As such the assembly with circuit board, chips and even the capacitors must be selected very carefully - both for sound and size. Many music players use a signal chip with a main structure made of an MPU, DAC and earphone amplifier. This structure always processed the audio at the cost of great loss with voices sounding stiff, rigid and apathetic. Ever felt fatigue or tired of listening to your normal music player? C4 is the solution.

The internal structure of the C4 is much more complex than traditional MP3 player. In the Pocket HIFI player, the original audio must pass through 8 units from input to output for the sake of getting the perfect voice. Have a look at the diagram on the right to see how much more carefully considered the signal path is in the C4.

Jitter Kill On the basic of top material and the complex unit designs, the structures which were made of by C4 clock generator, TCXO high-precision crystal Oscillators and the CS8422 SRC chip of CIRRUS output the unbelievable rate of jitter which was lower than 5ps. The circuit for Jitter Kill has been registered as a patent for the C4 Pocket HIFI player, making this ability quite unique.

The true audiophile is likely to have many questions concerning the Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi, but chief among them is likely to be ‘How f*%&ing much??!?’ At £549 this Chinese-made high fidelity portable music player is nobody’s idea of a bargain, but if you’re one of those brave souls who still cares about sound quality, who appreciates the convenience of digital but feels cheated by the compressed sound, Colorfly might just have something here.

Listening skills: Colorfly's Pocket Hi-Fi C4

Everything about the Colorfly is designed to give the impression of quality, from the black walnut wood shell with engraved back to the supplied gold-plated USB/mini USB cable. At least some of this is pure affectation – gold-plated connections may be popular on hi-fi gear, apparently delivering a more robust connection, but on USB cable this seems like overkill.

The old-school aesthetics of the volume slider and big, chunky buttons won’t appeal to everyone, but it feels very solidly built and combined with the interface – that includes metering of your audio levels – gives the air of reliability and class.

Virtually all digital music players these days make claims for ‘great sound quality’ but few take it to the extremes of the Colorfly Pocket Hi-Fi. It claims to be the only portable player capable of handling 24bit/192kHz audio files. By comparison, CD audio is 16-bit/44.1kHz and you could argue that there’s no real need for such a high resolution, but music production kit is capable of producing recordings at this level, and so here’s a portable player to match.

Among the controls, the music note button lets you scroll through the half-dozen equaliser settings. The SRC button has upsampling options which will help clocking with other high-end digital gear – the Colorfly does feature coax S/PDIF I/O, after all – and any noticeable audible benefits of effectively oversampling will be in the ear of the beholder.

Metering on-screen: ah, takes you back

Admittedly, you might need the hearing of a dog to notice improvements in high frequency decoding the Colorfly has the potential to deliver. Likewise, the Colorfly makes great play out of the C4's jitter performance – minimising timing errors that have an impact on vocal reproduction.

Taking the Flac

Uncompressed hi-res audio files take up a lot space, but thankfully there’s 32GB of storage on-board, and you can boost it by a further 32GB using the micro SD slot. Next to the 3.5mm minijack, the full-size 1/4in stereo headphone jack is another audiophile crowdpleaser.

Format support could do with expanding, but firmware updates are appearing that add functionality

In tests, the Colorfly could handle 24-bit/192kHz Wav files, 16-bit/44.1kHz Flac, Ape and MP3 files. A new downloadable update will apparently allow it to play 24/192 Flac files too, though there’s no word yet on when or even if it will be able to play iTunes-friendly AAC files, or perhaps more appropriately, Apple Lossless or WMA Lossless formats.

Sure enough, the sound of the Colorfly is something of a revelation. Playing some 16-bit Flac files downloaded from posh speaker manufacturer Bower & Wilkins’ Society of Sound site was simply glorious. A Retrospective by North eastern folkies The Unthanks sounded deliciously close and personal – almost indecently intimate – sustaining the atmosphere with every tic and trace from the recording sessions evident.

While I struggled to notice any difference with the upsampled 192kHz playback of MP3 files compared to their 44.1kHz source resolution, the Colorfly undoubtedly delivers a fuller and more complete sound than the same tracks played on cheaper PMPs. Also, it delivers a terrific output volume that's more than most ears will be comfortable with at full blast. There is a downside though: the battery life, during my random usage, never made it into double figures.

Still, it’s not just a portable player, oh no. The high-end Cirrus Logic CS4398 DAC chip and the coaxial S/PDIF digital in and outputs mean it can also be employed as an upscaling DAC (Digital Analogue Converter) as part of a hi-fi or home cinema system, raising the bar on quality at home, as well as on the move.

Digital interfacing broadens its versatility beyond a portable music player

If you spend any time at all on the Colorfly web site, you'll be convinced that the brains behind this portable player belong to audiophiles. Every aspect of the audio signal chain appears to have been scrutinised in order to deliver a quality product that’s versatile and genuinely capable bit of kit. Rarer still, in the portable world, is that it qualifies as a high-end component too.

Verdict

At this price – and given its frankly, over-engineered design – the Colorfly is always going to be a niche product. But if you care about the subtle nuances of sound reproduction, and can appreciate the difference between an MP3 and a FLAC file, then it’s definitely worth a look... and a listen.