To Friends and Customers of HIFIMAN:
Within the past two to three days, there has been some discussion online about the HIFIMAN SuperMini and MegaMini that I feel contains misinformation about the technology we use. So in the interest of clearing up any confusion and to make everyone comfortable in their consideration of our players, I offer the following clarifications.
HIFIMAN new player SuperMini and MegaMini: Single thread mode
A portable music player (PMP) is actually a mobile computer. There are a lot of portable music players that use an Android or Linux operating system. These systems are in multi-thread mode: CPU executes multiple processes or threads concurrently. Multiple threads can interfere with each other when sharing hardware resources, which creates jitter when playing music.
In computer programming, single threading is the processing of one command at a time. Instead of developing the music player software on existing Android or Linux operation system, the HIFIMAN team has developed its own embedded operating system. Specifically, HIFIMAN SuperMini and MegaMini are portable music players working in “single thread mode” most of the time; only some very small tasks such as displaying and button responses are running on multi-thread mode sometimes. More than 95% working time, they work as single threading so that their jitter level is much less than that of an Android or Linux PMP.
Reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_(computing)
About Gapless
When a PMP is playing music as gapless, current technology has to play music and read the next track simultaneously. That way it will play the next track as soon as it finishes playing the first track. Therefore, it is a multi-threading process.
The current beta version firmware of SuperMini and MegaMini cannot support Gapless. However, the HIFIMAN team has figured out a way to support gapless playback in single thread processing. In other words, there is no more jitter generated when a HIFIMAN SuperMini or MegaMini player is working as gapless. We plan to launch it in the official version firmware before the end of the year.
Supporting Exfat SD card
The current SuperMini and MegaMini cannot directly run an Exfat format SD card however you can format it in the player and support 64, 128 and 256G SD card without any problems. We are currently working on supporting Exfat and will support it in the official version firmware later this year.
If anyone has any questions, or would like further information, please contact customerservice@HIFIMAN.com. Thank you for your support.
Best Regards,
Fang