Walkman, MP3, MP4, these terms may be quite familiar to the post-80s and post-90s. As popular personal entertainment terminals in the second half of the 20th century and the 210s, they have almost disappeared after the rise of smartphones. For most post-00s, smartphones are the m

Walkman, MP3, MP4, these terms may be quite familiar to the post-80s and post-90s. As popular personal entertainment terminals in the second half of the 20th century and the 210s, they have almost disappeared after the rise of smartphones. For most post-00s, smartphones are the most commonly used and common entertainment devices they use.

However, without a sense of existence does not mean completely disappearing. There are still many manufacturers and users in the HiFi market that insist, such as Sony , Ailihe, Fei'ao , HiFi man, Shanling and other manufacturers To this day, a professional portable front-end (a device used in the HiFi circle to refer to music playback).

Compared with the mainstream HiFi front-end ten years ago, the current HiFi front-end has undergone great changes. For example, the Android system, which was once ridiculed by various HiFi enthusiasts and manufacturers, has now almost become the standard configuration of high-end HiFi players. The front-end has also entered the era of intelligence.

Image source: JD

This reminds me of a saying circulated among digital enthusiasts: All performance advantages will eventually fail to be convenient and portable. Whether the right or wrong of this sentence is still true or not, at least in the field of HiFi music, it is basically in line with the situation of HiFi music. of.

From disdain to following

, which manufacturer used Android system to the HiFi front-end is unknown, but the most famous early product should be Sony's NW-Z1000, the former Walkman series flagship, innovative and powerful Screen touch, Android system and Sony's professional audio technology combine to create a smart HiFi front-end.

Image source: official website

As a former user, NW -Z1000 gave me a bad experience, but in that era, it did not bring me too obvious experience gap with other players, because in 2011 There are not many easy-to-use online music software in the Android ecosystem. At that time, music software such as , Kugou , Kuwo, QQ, etc. could not meet the requirements of HiFi users in terms of quantity and quality of music, so the Android system has more functions to allow users to read online novels while listening to music. .

The early Android systems had natural disadvantages in audio signal processing. Due to the design of the underlying architecture of the system, the music signals processed by the Android system will be weaker than traditional HiFi players in terms of fidelity, although from the personal experience The impact is far lower than the changes brought about by pulling on EQ, but it is still unacceptable for users who pursue HiFi.

So the HiFi front-end of the Android system was not popular in the early days of its birth. even said that the arrival of the smart HiFi front-end is the end of the HiFi front-end. In addition to the traditional HiFi front-end intelligence, smartphone manufacturers are also moving closer to HiFi. In the most lively era of HiFi, many mobile phone manufacturers use HiFi music as their selling point, among which vivo has made HiFi to the extreme and equipped with professional circuits Design and decoding amplifiers.

Picture source: official website

Interestingly, HiFi enthusiasts have different attitudes towards HiFi phones. While they despise smart HiFi players, they also highly appreciate HiFi phones, believing that many of them have Fans of the 10,000-yuan TV phone can't help but buy a HiFi phone as the front end for going out. At this time, they don't care about fidelity anymore.

In fact, the good days of domestic HiFi front-end did not last long. The happiest time was between 2010 and 2014, smartphones were in full swing, and the MP3 market still remained warm. As you all know, With the popularity of smartphones, MP3 and MP4, which were once mainstream personal entertainment terminals, began to quickly withdraw from the mainstream market in just a few years. MP3 at least relies on the HiFi market to survive, MP4 Only exists in the elderly entertainment market.

The rapid shrinkage of the portable HiFi terminal market is somewhat beyond the expectations of major manufacturers. Faced with the fierce arrival of smartphones, domestic HiFi manufacturers will only be suppressed even more tragic if they do not make changes.How to change? Following up on intelligence is the only direction, especially after NetEase Cloud Music launched the gameplay of personal recommended music algorithms, online music software quickly captured a large number of music lovers.

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A former HiFi player who wants to find the music they want needs needs to find resource posts in various forums and post bars, then download and import them into the front-end, and finally automatically perform the music file on the front-end system. Archives are the end. Moreover, this is still in the case of good luck. If you are not lucky and find an unpopular song file that is lost due to the error of track grabbing (crawling music files from CD) and other reasons, then you can only watch one album Arranged in a messy way in the playlist.

, while online music software is different. NetEase Cloud Music’s innovative user playlist function and playlist sharing function allow users to quickly classify and find their favorite songs. Combined with algorithm recommendations, the previous series of processes is directly omitted and opened Software, click to play, everything is that simple.

As mentioned earlier, the various advantages of electronic products will ultimately be defeated by portability and convenience. online music software easily defeats other software and becomes the most commonly used music software for most HiFi users. Fortunately, NetEase Cloud Music is not a product launched by a certain HiFi manufacturer. The advantage of Android software lies in its openness. Only if your device supports Android, you can use it directly.

Therefore, now Android system has become the standard for portable front-end, and domestic HiFi manufacturers also have an additional "using a separate design so that the noise of the Android system will not affect the decoding amplifier." Even smarter has gradually spread from portable front-end to the desktop market. The old HiFi manufacturer Shanling has launched a desktop music player with built-in Android system. Once upon a time, HiFi players would think that they were still listening to online music when they were using a desktop. ?

Online Music Save HiFi?

HiFi has always been a very small circle, even more niche than photography. Of course, this refers to the real HiFi circle, not the crowd who likes to listen to music. There are many reasons why HiFi is niche. The most important reason is that HiFi devices are expensive, and secondly, it requires users to have enough time and space to "play", and time is what young users lack the most.

mobile game, Douyin , and B station have separated a lot of user attention, so the time that can be allocated to HiFi is naturally less. How many people are willing to spend a few hours collecting the music they like to listen to now Lossless file? Therefore, the popularity of online music functions has greatly reduced the time and energy users need to spend on HiFi.

Even if the sound quality is not as good as lossless music, IMHO, it is difficult for most people to distinguish the difference when using the same front-end and headphones, not to mention that most portable front-end users use the usage scenarios outdoors and noisy environments DSD Mastering can become lossy sound quality.

I can even say intuitively that if there is no online music, the market for HiFi front-end will be much smaller than now. For new users, most of the music they are familiar with and liked are saved in the playlists of QQ Music and NetEase Cloud Music. The time cost of re-finding and downloading is enough to stop a large number of newbies who want to try it out. The addition of online music software and Android system has made the entry threshold of HiFi lower.

For domestic front-end manufacturers, they are not satisfied with the shrinking HiFi front-end market, because the entry price of thousands of yuan is difficult for most users to accept, so they turned their attention to the "little tail" (Type-C conversion) 3.5mm interface converter).Speaking of which, the earliest use of "Little Tail" was just to enable mobile phones without a 3.5mm interface to use wired headphones, but later the manufacturer thought about it, since there were already accessories, why not upgrade some internal chips?

Image source: JD.com

So, we can see that some low-power, small-volume decoding amplifier chips are used in the "little tail", allowing users to access the mobile phone at any time, making the mobile phone a "temporary" HiFi Front end, used to connect wired headphones. Interestingly, the sales volume of "Little Tail" far exceeds that of traditional HiFi front-ends and has become a new flagship product for many manufacturers.

I have always believed that a circle has made its entry threshold too high, which is actually not conducive to the development of the circle. This was the case with the HiFi circle in the past. A group of users who came out of the Taiwanese era controlled the main voice. , open classical and closed-mouth classic, despising music lovers who listen to music with portable front ends and headphones.

is just as the times change, portable front-end has become the mainstream, mainstream users have gradually completed the replacement, Walkman, Ailihe, , Colorful and other manufacturers have become the mainstream, and people have begun to despise more portable smart front-ends, but they do not know that the feng shui turns around, After the New Year, I will become a "left old man".

In addition, with the increase in network speed, it is no longer difficult to play lossless music online. Sony's Hi-Res store, QQ, NetEase Cloud Music's Hi-Res format, and Apple Music lossless format all make Android users easy Obtain lossless format music, taking into account the sound quality and convenience requirements of HiFi users.

If the HiFi front-end has not entered the intelligent and the online music software has not launched a lossless format, then in the current HiFi circle, there may only be a few people who are happy.