Portable Audio doesn't get better than this!
Aug 25, 2012 16:57:28 GMT
Post by toad on Aug 25, 2012 16:57:28 GMT
The best portable Audio Source I've heard by far. The Open Pandora.
What is an Open Pandora?
Well simply put it's a portable device that can drive full size headphones properly without an additional amplifier. It can drive my Senheiser HD595s, Allesandro MS1s, Superlux HD681 and Goldring DR150 with ease. It makes an admirable attempt at driving my AKG K701s but can't quite pull it off. It's close though and makes a way better attempt than any other portable non amped source I've tried. It's loud enough but can't quite get the 701s to sing. There again a lot of desktop amps can't drive them properly either
Obviously it is fine with smaller headphones too. My Koss Porta Pros and Sennheiser PX100s sound great on the Pandora.
The Pandora was designed by a guy that wanted something that would drive his Sennheiser HD650s and he suceeded!
OK so What does it sound like?
Well the truth of the matter is, it's easy to forget you're plugged into a portable device. It has a presence and sense of space and seperation of instruments that's more akin to a desktop amp. In fact it's got a sound signature similar to the Panda desktop amp. It has serious grunt and is capable of delivering bass approaching the Panda for depth and impact. Mids are neutral and accurate, highs are detailed, not at all harsh and excellent for a portable device but not quite up to decent desktop amp standards.
Since the Pandora can handle so many different headphones it's able to get the most out of any genre you care to listen to.
Complex passages are handled well with the sounds blending into each other a little rather than getting really messed up like most portable sources. In other words this isn't going to replace your CD player or DAC but it's not going to sound bad either. The Pandora is able to convey a lot of the emotion an artist puts into their music which is pretty impressive for a portable device. Voices sound good with subtle inflections and emotions conveyed through the Pandora's audio hardware. Accoustic stuff sounds great. Rock gets your feet tapping etc. The Pandora conveys more emotion than any other portable device I've listened to. Did I mention the emotion?
The Pandora uses a pcm1773 and as such is limited to 48Khz but it still sounds great to me. Details of the DAC are here for the technically minded amongst you. www.ti.com/product/pcm1773
The Pandora measures approximately 140mm x 83mm x 28mm which is quite chunky but keep in mind you don't need an amp. The Pandora is also quite expensive at 440 Euros. However the Pandora also has quite a lot of tricks up it's sleeve. You see, the Pandora isn't an MP3 player or Media Player as such. It's a tiny Linux PC designed for on the go gaming and everything else you can do with a PC. Yep, it's a full featured Pocket Computer with an 800 x 480 resolution screen and a 600Mhz Arm Processor (most Pandoras are overclockable to 900Mhz or more) and there's a newer 1GHz version available too.
As a full computer the Pandora can do just about anything a full sized PC can do. It even has a full size USB port for attaching stuff. Although the Pandora isn't capable of running Windows, or windows software due to it having an Arm Processor, it does have many serious Linux applications.
Firefox - Yes, the full desktop web browser. None of that mobile website crud that your phone throws at you. Currently at version 14 I believe. For everything other than Flash heavy sites this is the portable browsing experience to beat. Especially for forum browsing and posting Many of my posts have been written on the Pandora. (Flash performance is only mediocre on native Pandora but does work. It runs ok in Android though)
Plenty of other browsing options are available. Chromium (The open source browser Google Chrome is based on) Midori, a fast full featured browser, Panda Browser, Lightweight2, Fennec and many more.
Abi Word - A full featured word processor capable of saving in MS Word format.
Gnumeric - A full featured spreadsheet capable of saving in MS Excel format.
The list goes on, My Paint, Grafx2, Gimp, Sunvox, VLC, Pidgin, FBReader, Worker, Gparted, Truecrypt and lots of other open source applications.
Plug in a USB hub, keyboard and mouse and you could be at the office. Talking of which I've used mine at the office a few times for real world jobs.
There are several music players. My favourite is the Pandora port of Audacious audacious-media-player.org/
The Pandora also has an Android 2.3 Gingerbread port. Setup a dedicated Android partition on an SD card, copy the Android PND file to an SD card and pop it into the Pandora and boot into Android from the Pandoras desktop via an icon Not everything runs but plenty of stuff does!
PNDs by the way are the method the Pandora uses to run software. Simply download a PND file, stick it in a directory on your Pandora SD card and it appears on the desktop or in the menu or both. No installs necessary
Want a dedicated music Pandora? Simply build an SD card with all your favourite music and players on it and insert it into the Pandora. Want a Gaming Pandora? Simply build a gaming SD card and insert. Want a serious business applications pandora? Want Android?... Swap and change SD cards and Pandora flavours to your hearts content.
By the way if you are into retro gaming (I was in the games industry briefly 20 odd years ago hence my interest) the Pandora can emulate just about everything from Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Comoddore c64 to Atari ST (People have used USB midi to drive synths from Atari cubase Ian!) and Amigas. Early Pentium PCs via DOS box and Qemu. For Consoles it can emulate everything from Nintendo NES, Gameboy and Gameboy colour up to Game Boy Advance, Megadrive, SNES, Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64, bascially just about anything up to and including the PS1 and N64 can be emulated. Of course on the emulated computers there are retro applications too. Mmmmm Deluxe Paint on Amiga I'm tempted to set up my Blitz Basic Amia dev environment and start coding Amiga stuff again lol.
The possibilities are endless. boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/8527-strange-uses-for-the-pandora/ Just a few of the unconventional uses to which people have put their Pandoras.
I have a few 32GB SDHC cards and several smaller cards but there are people that have sucessfully used 128GB SDXC cards. With 2 card slots that gives you the potential of a 256GB PC that fits in your pocket! Browse the Pandora forums for compatible brands if you go the SDXC route though.
256GB not enough for you? I often plug my 500GB Western Digital Passport Drive into my Pandora to copy music to SD card. No power supply necessary! I'd expect the newer larger capacity drives to work too and if they don't a battery powered USB hub should sort them out.
Battery life is amazing. 10+ hours minimum whatever you're doing and people have reported up to 43 hours music playing with the screen closed. I've never used mine exclusively for music but I don't doubt the figures. It's the only device I have where it wouldn't worry me if I was taking it out and the battery was only at 30% because that's still a minimum of 3 hours use even thrashing the Pandora with a processor and graphics heavy application.
Ever wished you could charge your phone up when out and about. Well as the Pandora has a full size USB port and a massive 4000 mAh battery you can charge just about any phone from the usb port.
New software is being written for the Pandora everyday. Most of it is free and open source.
Technical Specs pulled from Openpandora.org:
The Pandora can be bought with one of the two following SoCs: The OMAP3530 or DM3730.
Here are the complete specs:
Texas Instruments OMAP3530 processor at 600MHz (officially) or Texas Instruments DM3730 processor or 1000MHz (officially)
256MB or 512MB DDR-333 SDRAM
512MB NAND FLASH memory
IVA2+ audio and video processor using TI's DaVinci™ technology (430MHz C64x DSP)
ARM® Cortex™-A8 superscalar microprocessor core
PowerVR SGX530 (110MHz on OMAP3530, 200MHz on DM3730) OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant 3D hardware
integrated Wifi 802.11b/g (up to 18dBm output)
integrated Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (3Mbps) (Class 2, + 4dBm)
800x480 resolution LTPS LCD with resistive touch screen, 4.3" widescreen, 16.7 million colors (300 cd/m2 brightness, 450:1 contrast ratio)
Dual analog controllers
Full gamepad controls plus shoulder buttons
Dual SDHC card slots (up to 64GB of storage currently)
headphone output up to 150mW/channel into 16 ohms, 99dB SNR (up to 24 bit/48KHz)
TV output (composite and S-Video)
Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset
Stereo line level inputs and outputs
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
USB 2.0 OTG port (1.5/12/480Mbps) with capability to charge device
USB 2.0 HOST port (480Mbps) capable of providing the full 500mA to attached devices (examples include USB memory, keyboard, mouse, 3G modem, GPS)
up to two externally accessible UARTs and/or four PWM signals for hardware hacking, robot control, debugging, etc.
un-brickable design with integrated boot loader for safe code experimentation
Power and hold switch useful for "instant on" and key lockout to aid in media player applications on the go
Runs on the Linux operating system (3.2.x)
Dimensions: 140x83.4x27.5mm
Weight: 335g (with 4000mAh battery)
Quotes re Audio from the Pandora Forums just so you don't think I'm being over the top in my assesment of this tiny wonder:
Re a comment I made about the Audio quality. "Michael Weston also likes audio and insisted we use some quite expensive parts there, he will be very happy you noticed." - Craig Rothwell of Openpandora.
--
And then Michael himself chipped into the conversation:
"Yes I did try to tweak the audio as best I could between the limited board revisions. I used a pair of Shure SE530's to get the noise floor as low as possible. Those bastards hiss at any noise! My laptop sounds like my damn shower is running!
The DAC has a 99dB SNR level at the voltage used. The headphone amp has a 100dB SNR with low gain and the output can swing 4Vpp which is much more than most MP3 players out there. Ferrite chip based pi filtering was done on the amp's supply and the 5V supply was denied pulse skip mode to keep ringing out of the audio stage.
The Pandora drives the 650s to sound levels as high as I need for all but ear abusive listening.
Craig, the main reason we had to use all this external hardware was because of that volume wheel. The only way to attenuate an analog signal is to produce it separately.
I'm glad you like how it sounds. I'm not afraid to say I like a little EQ in my music and Audacious sounds fantastic." - Michael Weston, Pandora's designer.
--
"I can say this sounds better than my ipod touch 4g using my Bose earphones, im loving it" - Dark Link
--
"I was really surprised at the power output the Pandora has for audio. I tried them with my audio-technica ath-m50 headphones and quickly found that I only needed about 20-30% volume for it to be loud (100% would definitely be painful). In comparison, on my Cowon D2 I need the volume at about 60%, and my N900 about 90-100% (N900 simply isn't loud enough to be used on a bus). Even if you had some lower sensitivity or higher ohm headphones, the Pandora would probably drive them just fine. This is actually the best sounding portable device I've ever heard, and the D2 isn't any slouch." - Elanzer
--
"I was surprised at the audio quality from the Pandora, I use Flac and it really was detailed and even had enough power to drive my old Audio Technica ATH-911 although not at ear-wax melting volumes." - Wild_Duck
--
"I know this is an old topic, but I just got my Pandora today. I can confirm: Pandora's audio output through the headphone jack is unreal. I'm using a pair of Etymotic ER-4p's, and my usual mp3 player is a Cowon D2. The D2 is not even in the same ballpark. If the Pandora did nothing other than play music and browse the web, I would be perfectly happy with it" - cobalt
--
In conclusion if you're not afraid to take the plunge into the world of linux (it's not that different really) the Pandora is a great audio device with the added benefit of a great mini PC too. As it was conceived by a few guys on the internet with the input from a few thousand retro gaming fans it's a little rough around the edges and it's had it's fair share of manufacturing hickups and quality issues in the past. With production moved to Germany now, things are at last much better. And the support and community are second to none.
If you have the inclinations the Pandora has literally no limits. Listen to Music, Watch Video, Coding on the go, Music creation, writing a novel, managing your accounts...
The Pandora is totally open source (apart from the hardware) To that end, you can do whatever you like with it. In fact the OpenPandora team encourages you to do just that.
I've been one of the lucky few to have owned a Pandora for over two years and now the project has matured I can at last let you in on one of the best kept audio secrets around. The 512MB 600Mhz Pandora is able to run just about anything (again most are overclockable to around 900Mhz) I have the old 256MB version and it runs most stuff fine. Of course if you have money to spare then the 1GHz Pandora is the way to go
Ian
I'm uploading a few pics to photobucket. I'll link them later.
PS Link to buy one should you want to www.dragonbox.de/en/16-pandora
Pics as promissed:
What is an Open Pandora?
Well simply put it's a portable device that can drive full size headphones properly without an additional amplifier. It can drive my Senheiser HD595s, Allesandro MS1s, Superlux HD681 and Goldring DR150 with ease. It makes an admirable attempt at driving my AKG K701s but can't quite pull it off. It's close though and makes a way better attempt than any other portable non amped source I've tried. It's loud enough but can't quite get the 701s to sing. There again a lot of desktop amps can't drive them properly either
Obviously it is fine with smaller headphones too. My Koss Porta Pros and Sennheiser PX100s sound great on the Pandora.
The Pandora was designed by a guy that wanted something that would drive his Sennheiser HD650s and he suceeded!
OK so What does it sound like?
Well the truth of the matter is, it's easy to forget you're plugged into a portable device. It has a presence and sense of space and seperation of instruments that's more akin to a desktop amp. In fact it's got a sound signature similar to the Panda desktop amp. It has serious grunt and is capable of delivering bass approaching the Panda for depth and impact. Mids are neutral and accurate, highs are detailed, not at all harsh and excellent for a portable device but not quite up to decent desktop amp standards.
Since the Pandora can handle so many different headphones it's able to get the most out of any genre you care to listen to.
Complex passages are handled well with the sounds blending into each other a little rather than getting really messed up like most portable sources. In other words this isn't going to replace your CD player or DAC but it's not going to sound bad either. The Pandora is able to convey a lot of the emotion an artist puts into their music which is pretty impressive for a portable device. Voices sound good with subtle inflections and emotions conveyed through the Pandora's audio hardware. Accoustic stuff sounds great. Rock gets your feet tapping etc. The Pandora conveys more emotion than any other portable device I've listened to. Did I mention the emotion?
The Pandora uses a pcm1773 and as such is limited to 48Khz but it still sounds great to me. Details of the DAC are here for the technically minded amongst you. www.ti.com/product/pcm1773
The Pandora measures approximately 140mm x 83mm x 28mm which is quite chunky but keep in mind you don't need an amp. The Pandora is also quite expensive at 440 Euros. However the Pandora also has quite a lot of tricks up it's sleeve. You see, the Pandora isn't an MP3 player or Media Player as such. It's a tiny Linux PC designed for on the go gaming and everything else you can do with a PC. Yep, it's a full featured Pocket Computer with an 800 x 480 resolution screen and a 600Mhz Arm Processor (most Pandoras are overclockable to 900Mhz or more) and there's a newer 1GHz version available too.
As a full computer the Pandora can do just about anything a full sized PC can do. It even has a full size USB port for attaching stuff. Although the Pandora isn't capable of running Windows, or windows software due to it having an Arm Processor, it does have many serious Linux applications.
Firefox - Yes, the full desktop web browser. None of that mobile website crud that your phone throws at you. Currently at version 14 I believe. For everything other than Flash heavy sites this is the portable browsing experience to beat. Especially for forum browsing and posting
Many of my posts have been written on the Pandora. (Flash performance is only mediocre on native Pandora but does work. It runs ok in Android though)Plenty of other browsing options are available. Chromium (The open source browser Google Chrome is based on) Midori, a fast full featured browser, Panda Browser, Lightweight2, Fennec and many more.
Abi Word - A full featured word processor capable of saving in MS Word format.
Gnumeric - A full featured spreadsheet capable of saving in MS Excel format.
The list goes on, My Paint, Grafx2, Gimp, Sunvox, VLC, Pidgin, FBReader, Worker, Gparted, Truecrypt and lots of other open source applications.
Plug in a USB hub, keyboard and mouse and you could be at the office. Talking of which I've used mine at the office a few times for real world jobs.
There are several music players. My favourite is the Pandora port of Audacious audacious-media-player.org/
The Pandora also has an Android 2.3 Gingerbread port. Setup a dedicated Android partition on an SD card, copy the Android PND file to an SD card and pop it into the Pandora and boot into Android from the Pandoras desktop via an icon
Not everything runs but plenty of stuff does!PNDs by the way are the method the Pandora uses to run software. Simply download a PND file, stick it in a directory on your Pandora SD card and it appears on the desktop or in the menu or both. No installs necessary
Want a dedicated music Pandora? Simply build an SD card with all your favourite music and players on it and insert it into the Pandora. Want a Gaming Pandora? Simply build a gaming SD card and insert. Want a serious business applications pandora? Want Android?... Swap and change SD cards and Pandora flavours to your hearts content.
By the way if you are into retro gaming (I was in the games industry briefly 20 odd years ago hence my interest) the Pandora can emulate just about everything from Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Comoddore c64 to Atari ST (People have used USB midi to drive synths from Atari cubase Ian!) and Amigas. Early Pentium PCs via DOS box and Qemu. For Consoles it can emulate everything from Nintendo NES, Gameboy and Gameboy colour up to Game Boy Advance, Megadrive, SNES, Playstation 1 and Nintendo 64, bascially just about anything up to and including the PS1 and N64 can be emulated. Of course on the emulated computers there are retro applications too. Mmmmm Deluxe Paint on Amiga
I'm tempted to set up my Blitz Basic Amia dev environment and start coding Amiga stuff again lol.The possibilities are endless. boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/8527-strange-uses-for-the-pandora/ Just a few of the unconventional uses to which people have put their Pandoras.
I have a few 32GB SDHC cards and several smaller cards but there are people that have sucessfully used 128GB SDXC cards. With 2 card slots that gives you the potential of a 256GB PC that fits in your pocket! Browse the Pandora forums for compatible brands if you go the SDXC route though.
256GB not enough for you? I often plug my 500GB Western Digital Passport Drive into my Pandora to copy music to SD card. No power supply necessary! I'd expect the newer larger capacity drives to work too and if they don't a battery powered USB hub should sort them out.
Battery life is amazing. 10+ hours minimum whatever you're doing and people have reported up to 43 hours music playing with the screen closed. I've never used mine exclusively for music but I don't doubt the figures. It's the only device I have where it wouldn't worry me if I was taking it out and the battery was only at 30% because that's still a minimum of 3 hours use even thrashing the Pandora with a processor and graphics heavy application.
Ever wished you could charge your phone up when out and about. Well as the Pandora has a full size USB port and a massive 4000 mAh battery you can charge just about any phone from the usb port.
New software is being written for the Pandora everyday. Most of it is free and open source.
Technical Specs pulled from Openpandora.org:
The Pandora can be bought with one of the two following SoCs: The OMAP3530 or DM3730.
Here are the complete specs:
Texas Instruments OMAP3530 processor at 600MHz (officially) or Texas Instruments DM3730 processor or 1000MHz (officially)
256MB or 512MB DDR-333 SDRAM
512MB NAND FLASH memory
IVA2+ audio and video processor using TI's DaVinci™ technology (430MHz C64x DSP)
ARM® Cortex™-A8 superscalar microprocessor core
PowerVR SGX530 (110MHz on OMAP3530, 200MHz on DM3730) OpenGL ES 2.0 compliant 3D hardware
integrated Wifi 802.11b/g (up to 18dBm output)
integrated Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (3Mbps) (Class 2, + 4dBm)
800x480 resolution LTPS LCD with resistive touch screen, 4.3" widescreen, 16.7 million colors (300 cd/m2 brightness, 450:1 contrast ratio)
Dual analog controllers
Full gamepad controls plus shoulder buttons
Dual SDHC card slots (up to 64GB of storage currently)
headphone output up to 150mW/channel into 16 ohms, 99dB SNR (up to 24 bit/48KHz)
TV output (composite and S-Video)
Internal microphone plus ability to connect external microphone through headset
Stereo line level inputs and outputs
43 button QWERTY and numeric keypad
USB 2.0 OTG port (1.5/12/480Mbps) with capability to charge device
USB 2.0 HOST port (480Mbps) capable of providing the full 500mA to attached devices (examples include USB memory, keyboard, mouse, 3G modem, GPS)
up to two externally accessible UARTs and/or four PWM signals for hardware hacking, robot control, debugging, etc.
un-brickable design with integrated boot loader for safe code experimentation
Power and hold switch useful for "instant on" and key lockout to aid in media player applications on the go
Runs on the Linux operating system (3.2.x)
Dimensions: 140x83.4x27.5mm
Weight: 335g (with 4000mAh battery)
Quotes re Audio from the Pandora Forums just so you don't think I'm being over the top in my assesment of this tiny wonder:
Re a comment I made about the Audio quality. "Michael Weston also likes audio and insisted we use some quite expensive parts there, he will be very happy you noticed." - Craig Rothwell of Openpandora.
--
And then Michael himself chipped into the conversation:
"Yes I did try to tweak the audio as best I could between the limited board revisions. I used a pair of Shure SE530's to get the noise floor as low as possible. Those bastards hiss at any noise! My laptop sounds like my damn shower is running!
The DAC has a 99dB SNR level at the voltage used. The headphone amp has a 100dB SNR with low gain and the output can swing 4Vpp which is much more than most MP3 players out there. Ferrite chip based pi filtering was done on the amp's supply and the 5V supply was denied pulse skip mode to keep ringing out of the audio stage.
The Pandora drives the 650s to sound levels as high as I need for all but ear abusive listening.
Craig, the main reason we had to use all this external hardware was because of that volume wheel. The only way to attenuate an analog signal is to produce it separately.
I'm glad you like how it sounds. I'm not afraid to say I like a little EQ in my music and Audacious sounds fantastic." - Michael Weston, Pandora's designer.
--
"I can say this sounds better than my ipod touch 4g using my Bose earphones, im loving it" - Dark Link
--
"I was really surprised at the power output the Pandora has for audio. I tried them with my audio-technica ath-m50 headphones and quickly found that I only needed about 20-30% volume for it to be loud (100% would definitely be painful). In comparison, on my Cowon D2 I need the volume at about 60%, and my N900 about 90-100% (N900 simply isn't loud enough to be used on a bus). Even if you had some lower sensitivity or higher ohm headphones, the Pandora would probably drive them just fine. This is actually the best sounding portable device I've ever heard, and the D2 isn't any slouch." - Elanzer
--
"I was surprised at the audio quality from the Pandora, I use Flac and it really was detailed and even had enough power to drive my old Audio Technica ATH-911 although not at ear-wax melting volumes." - Wild_Duck
--
"I know this is an old topic, but I just got my Pandora today. I can confirm: Pandora's audio output through the headphone jack is unreal. I'm using a pair of Etymotic ER-4p's, and my usual mp3 player is a Cowon D2. The D2 is not even in the same ballpark. If the Pandora did nothing other than play music and browse the web, I would be perfectly happy with it" - cobalt
--
In conclusion if you're not afraid to take the plunge into the world of linux (it's not that different really) the Pandora is a great audio device with the added benefit of a great mini PC too. As it was conceived by a few guys on the internet with the input from a few thousand retro gaming fans it's a little rough around the edges and it's had it's fair share of manufacturing hickups and quality issues in the past. With production moved to Germany now, things are at last much better. And the support and community are second to none.
If you have the inclinations the Pandora has literally no limits. Listen to Music, Watch Video, Coding on the go, Music creation, writing a novel, managing your accounts...
The Pandora is totally open source (apart from the hardware) To that end, you can do whatever you like with it. In fact the OpenPandora team encourages you to do just that.
I've been one of the lucky few to have owned a Pandora for over two years and now the project has matured I can at last let you in on one of the best kept audio secrets around. The 512MB 600Mhz Pandora is able to run just about anything (again most are overclockable to around 900Mhz) I have the old 256MB version and it runs most stuff fine. Of course if you have money to spare then the 1GHz Pandora is the way to go
Ian
I'm uploading a few pics to photobucket. I'll link them later.
PS Link to buy one should you want to www.dragonbox.de/en/16-pandora
Pics as promissed:
