[Award]Dealbreakers of 2014: Pono promo, Calyx M and LH Labs GeekOut (Darko.Audio, 2014. 12)

Reviewing, by its very nature, is mostly a subjective process. However, there are more helpful questions than “Do I like this?”. Asking oneself “What does it sound like?”, “How does it compare to rivals?” and “Who will like this?” are ultimately what lead to proper insight.

But sometimes, no matter how good a product sounds or how probably universal its appeal, a single feature or design misstep can spoil the party. What we’re talking about here is dealbreakers.

“A deal breaker is ‘the catch’ that a particular individual cannot overlook and ultimately outweighs any redeeming quality the individual [product] may possess.”, says Urban Dictionary.

Nothing is perfect. Not everything is for everyone. You can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Here are three products that presented all fine and dandy until I hit upon (what I thought to be) an Achilles heel.

Calyx M player

Seungmok Yi first showed an early prototype of his Calyx M digital audio player at CES 2013. Renaming the Calyx Facebook page after a single product in the brand’s range gave the impression that Yi was forsaking his well-received DACs and amplifiers that had preceded it. Calyx was now a single egg in a single basket.

I first clapped ears on the Calyx M at May’s Fujiya-Avic headphone festival in Tokyo. The first thing that strikes you about the M is its size. It’s bigger and heavier than the Astell&Kern AK120 II.The M’s touch screen runs to almost 5 inches. On the other hand, at US$999 it’s also almost half the price. Early versions were plagued by glitch UI responsiveness – something I noticed when manhandling a pre-production unit in Tokyo. However, breaking the deal within a few minutes for this fella was the Calyx M’s volume slider. Apply light thumb pressure and it doesn’t budge. Apply more pressure and it jags higher. Sometimes much higher. The volume slider’s design makes it tricky to find more through evenly spaced increments when attenuating volume. Compared to the Astell&Kern rotary or Sony NWZ-ZX1 it felt downright agricultural. No deal.

UPDATE 19th December. Seungmok Yi responded to this post with the following: “Have you tried M with the latest firmware 1.01? This firmware raised the bar a lot. including better DAC alogorithm, finer/clearer volume control, time domain minimum phase filter and so on…Now M can be said a next generation…”

John Darko

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