The Colorfly U8 DAP gets the First Contact treatment in our new video with a short walk-through and initial impressions. The U8 is priced at $1199.
Disclaimer: The Colorfly U8 was sent to us in exchange for our honest opinion on these forthcoming impressions, video, and review to come soon. Many thanks to Colorfly for giving us this opportunity.
To read up on other Colrfly products we have covered on Headfonics click here.
Note, to watch the video simply click on the play button in the middle of the picture above.
Colorfly was one of the originals DAP manufacturers back in the day to release its ultra-high-end portable player. Marcus still has his C4 Pro from almost 10 years ago and loves it. So, it was refreshing to step back and see how one of the OG’s in DAP making would rekindle the market for portable music sources.
Initial Impressions
The new $1200 Colorfly U8 is a beast of a portable player, with a fantastic UI and EQ system that is extremely detailed and coherent. Yes, some of the presets are actually very nice! Some aren’t.
For the most part, the overall sound fidelity of the unit from top to bottom is fantastic. It is easily among the best I’ve ever heard. Although, the unit has some firmware issues at the moment and I hope that gets fixed sometime in the very near future.
The Themes area is empty and I’ve had some issues also with track skipping into a total system freeze. Those are typically normal on beta firmware though, so I expect they will be patched very soon.
The player has a stunning OLED screen! Oh my goodness it looks so vivid and crisp. Sadly, the battery of the U8 is not as powerful on standby time as I would have hoped. I can’t leave it in standby mode for long without the battery drained upon the next attempt to use it. It also generates a fair degree of heat from the chassis which may be uncomfortable for some.
The system bootup takes almost 36 seconds, which in today’s market is extremely slow. For now, I think the player sounds among the best I’ve ever heard and I am eager to start trying new headphone combinations with it to see what sounds absurdly great and what doesn’t.
You can expect our full review out in the coming weeks leading up to the festive season. In the meantime find out more about what we think of Colorfly’s previous products in the link here.
Colorfly U8 Technical Specifications
- Model: Pocket HiFi U8
- Display: 3.97 “WVGA 800*480 0.87” OLED auxiliary screen
- Sampling rate: PCM 8KHz-384KHz DSD64-DSD512
- Output level: unbalanced 2.1Vrms balanced 2.1Vrms
- DAC chip: COLORFLY α (alpha)
- DNR@600RZ: 123dBA
- THD+N@600RZ: -110dB (0.0005%)
- Maximum output power: 130mW
- PEQ: supports 31 segments of +7 segment (professional mode)
- WiFi: 802.11b/g/n (2.4GHz)
- Bluetooth: V4.0 (A2DP, AVRCP)
- Size: 110mm * 66mm * 14mm
- Headphone interface: 3.5mm (single end ) 2.5mm (balance)
- Native memory: 64G
- TF Card: 256G Max
- Battery capacity: 3300mAh
