HiFi Mp3 Player with Bluetooth: F35 DSD Lossless Music Player - 4.0 inches Hi Res Digital Audio Player 128GB Support up to 512GB Memory Card

This has been a very good device for playing music via bluetooth to a variety of speakers. The sound quality is excellent and the device has a good set of menus that make it very easy to operate. I would give it five stars except that it has a couple of small "warts". When fully charged, the battery gauge reads only 92%, and occasionally, it will fail to read song files from the micro SD card, so I have to eject and reinstall the card (sometimes more than once) to clear the problem. I like the size of the device, and the text on the menus is a good size for readability. Overall, a really good MP3 player.

Surfans F-35 is a remarkably good upgrade from their previous players, which were already fantastic. Sturdy metal body with touchscreen display and controls, balanced or unbalanced headphone connections, maximum micro-SD card size 500GB will hold your entire collection of uncompressed audio and play it back beautifully. I cannot tell the difference between listening to the same tracks from a CD (through a pro CD player) or from the F-35 with the same balanced headphones (Sennheiser HD660S). Truly remarkable sound. I test every piece of audio with Steely Dan's "Black Cow" and "Peg" from Aja, and Eric Clapton's "Signe" from Unplugged. The highs of hi-hat and ride cymbal are crisp and not at all noisy, and the lows of the fretless bass are juicy and fat with no rumble. USB data connection is flawless. The micro-SD functions flawlessly whether in the unit or directly plugged into your computer. The analog volume wheel is a stepped-pot design, and is completely noiseless when adjusting. The only physical buttons are power and track up/down. Everything else is controlled through the large, bright touchscreen. The battery charges quickly through USB and holds a charge for a decent number of hours straight listening time. If I could give it 6 stars I would.

Some background to give my review some context: I bought this to replace a 12-year old ipod that’s on its last leg. Most of my usage is with my home stereo, where the ipod had been communicating digitally with a receiver that handles the DAC. I'm old enough to have an original vinyl record collection and I have gone through many music media technologies vinyl, 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs, etc. Also note I am *not* a “Vine Voice" (and didn't get this for free)As the saying goes “caveat emptor” and while I read product reviews and watched many youtube videos on this and its competitors, I knew I was taking a gamble on this. I won’t go into why I ended up choosing the F35 over its competition, but I do want to share some things I wished I had known in hopes this might help others.Much has been written about its digital audio capabilities, its large, heavy and solid construction, its sound quality, etc so I won’t go into all that. I’m going to focus more on general user experience.After using an ipod for nearly 20 years as an audio source for my home stereo, it’s a bit of a shock to use a different and generally inferior user interface. It’s also a shock to buy something this expensive and have no dedicated library management software (both of which I was aware prior to purchase, but it’s still a shock)The interface is oddly organized and labeled. For instance, the section called “The Playlist” has no playlists at all. Instead, it’s a categorization of your library, how many albums, artists, genres, etc. The section called “My Music” is where you find the playlists and the menu commands to manage playlists.Creating playlists on the device is somewhat confusing, but I prefer to manage my library on PC anyway. As mentioned, there’s no dedicated library manager, but on their website they have made available a 13-year old GNU-licensed freeware app (for Windows) that creates basic M3U playlist files. (For those not familiar with these, they are just text files with the path to each file listed in sequential order.)After adding music files and creating/modifying a playlist via PC you have to tell the device to update the file list and then update the playlists, each with a separate menu commands, located in different parts of the interface.Another oddity is when you want to play a particular album. If you select Artist and then the album title, the songs are presented (and played!) in *alphabetical* order by title, not in the order in which they appear on the album (even if the song file contains metadata to control the play order). But if you select Album then the Album name the songs are in the correct order. (?!)I could go on, but these examples illustrate that that interface – while mostly functional -- is not well developed. It says it’s version 1.0 so perhaps future firmware updates will improve the interface. In short, the interface feels undeveloped, like an early beta.Managing audio options is a little awkward and split between two different areas of the interface. But it does offer a lot of options for digital and analog processing, some more useful that others.For example, as mentioned above, I use it primarily with my stereo using the 3.5mm analog output. There is an option to set to “line output” which locks the volume to max and provides the signal at line level voltage. However, this option resets as soon as the auxiliary cable is removed (which I must do to move the unit to my PC for file transfer). I’d prefer it retain that setting but I’m sure they chose this to protect people using headphones.The manual is somewhat helpful, but like many modern user’s manuals, it is not up to date – there are several differences between the user interface as I received it and what is described in the manual, I would suspect due to late changes prior to release. There is manual available at their website but as of this date (Jan 2024) it is even more out of date than the printed manual, as it corresponds to the previous version which had physical buttons on the front.A few general comments, echoing some other reviews. The packaging was quite nice and gave a good first impression of a higher-quality product. In addition to the unit, it comes with a short USB cable and a brief printed user manual.Compared to the ipod nano its replacing, the F35 is very large and quite heavy. Since it will just sit on my stereo receiver most of the time that’s not an issue for me. But I would not recommend the F35 to anyone looking for something compact and lightweight.The sound quality is quite good and it supports many different file formats. I don’t have a lot of lossless files just yet, but those I recently obtained do sound nice coming from the F35. I’m mostly playing 320kbps MP3’s and they sound as good coming out the analog port into my receiver as the ipod did through the receiver’s digital interface.Being a large unit, the color touch screen is good sized, and there are a few options to adjust the layout, brightness and font size of the interface.The battery life is only so-so in my opinion. There are options to conserve battery, but so far I can't get it last as long as my ipod battery (even after its 12 years of use). Perhaps it’s because of the particular settings I’m using. And takes several hours to reach full charge even with the recommended power supply.I’ll end my comments with a few grades:Packaging: AExterior design: BBuild quality: AUser Interface: CUser Experience (including file management on PC): CBattery life: BOverall grade: BI’m reasonably satisfied with my purchase but it’s not without its warts.

I made this purchase about five months ago on January 25th, 2024 and I have tried hard since then to make peace with my decision, but sound quality alone is not a good reason to let go of my frustrations with the F35. Its size is not an issue as in the past I've actually got a lot of mileage from a Zune I had for a number of years. At least the Zune (made fun of by many a reviewer) was realiable and its functions intuitive. Given the F35 constantly losing connection with the bluetooth (top of the line Beats earbuds), going into a phase of playing half a track then skipping to half another song, then freezing up, I have expected a firmware update but nothing has been forthcoming. Given the higher price tag and many a good YouTube review, the experience has left me extremely disappointed. I go for 4-5 mile moderate hikes with no jogging involved which should place no strain on the response of the F35.

Some difficulty establishing consistent contact with ear phones plug in socket. It seems like the socket slightly too large'. Everything is great.

I have a large music collection including much recorded live over many years. The difficulty with Sonos to get oddly acquired content into a building wide distribution led to costly installation and to my ears so-so sound plus many music 'choices' (all kinds) all sounding like elevator music. :-(This device sending simple computer drag & drop music file (thousands of recordings) to a wireless blue tooth 'BluDento' Music receiver plugged into the main preamplifier did for pocket money what $4000 did poorly; except did it well. No, not well, terrifically. Excellent sound. = Live! I didn't know how good my source files were. Look in the settings for the best output for your set up. Mine was default flat, as all my files were high end. Batteries in a small device are limited but it works nonstop if plugged in (5V usb).