I received two completely different players from the Chinese manufacturer Colorful, one of which was able to rock all the existing acoustics at home and surprise with its sound, while the other demonstrated decent sound for its modest dimensions.
Meet Colorfly C4 Pro and Colorfly C3 .
You already understand who is in charge here. C4 Pro is like an external DAC with an amplifier, only with a built-in battery, music storage, display and control buttons.
C3 is small, portable, sounds good. But he'll come see us later.
Design and dimensions of Colorfly C4 Pro
He is big. Its thickness is 2 cm. This is preceded by rich technical equipment. Dimensions: 72 x 124 x 20 mm.
But it doesn’t weigh that much, almost 2 times less than the iPad Air: 259 g.
The body is made of solid walnut wood.
The Colorfly crest is hand carved. The company was founded in 1995 in China, and specializes in video cards and components. In 2010 it entered the market of portable Hi-Fi players.
The front panel is made of artificially aged brass (a multi-component copper-based alloy) and resembles something from acoustics from the 90s.
The unique arrangement of the music control and navigation buttons in the system does not require getting used to. Interesting concept. This is especially true for the volume slider; similar ones are used in mixers.
Connectors, operating time
Connects to your computer using a Mini USB cable; any compatible USB adapter is suitable for charging.
C4 Pro can output a signal through 3 connectors: 6.3 mm 3.5 mm mini-jack and RCA . One caveat, the headphone outputs are different: the jack is designed for high-impedance acoustics up to 300 Ohms, the sound through it is more powerful and dynamic.
32GB of internal memory microSD cards up to 32GB. In practice, it is possible to play music from 64 GB cards, but nothing official has been said about this.
In my opinion, for listeners with a large music collection, 32GB + 32GB will be a bit cramped. Moreover, the player was clearly not created for listening to compressed files.
Questions also arise with battery life. Stated - five hours . In fact, it can work for two to three hours if you connect high-impedance headphones and set the volume to high. Also, the player does not have an auto-shutdown feature when you press pause. I left it on the table and came back a little later – it was discharged . The charging itself lasts about three hours.
Control
Management still gives me mixed feelings . I love minimalism, but in this case I was a little uncomfortable. A little inconvenient 4 elongated buttons and play/pause buttons, with a back button, too small. BUT IT'S ALL THE LITTLE THINGS. The buttons are easy to get used to. They are tactilely clearly distinguishable and overall the controls are not bad.
The whole problem is in the firmware. It is she who is inconvenient, and physical control is a hostage to the situation
