Meet The OPUS#1S Player by The BIT

If you were to ask a group of average consumers to list a couple of manufacturers who produce high quality audio-related products, you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear the names of Sony, Sennheiser, and probably Shure, but not many people are aware of The BIT, and much less their Opus line of portable music players. Thus far they have produced a few DAPs, with the OPUS#1S being their latest offering.

What’s So Great About The OPUS#1S?

The thing is, the entire line of OPUS players are all squarely aimed at people who want a premium product. As such, the OPUS#1S packs all the bells and whistles.
Under the hood lies an ARM Cortex-A9 1.4GHz, Quad-Core CPU chip, along with 1GB of DDR3 RAM, and dual CS43198 DAC chips from Cirrus Logic to handle the audio decoding. These high performance DAC chips allow the OPUS#1S to achieve an impressively high SNR figures of 123dB and 125dB from its single-ended and balanced ports respectively. Jitter is also kept very low at a mere 50ps.

The BIT has also installed 32GB of internal memory, which would mean a theoretical maximum of around 540GB of space will be available if utilising dual 256GB microSD cards as well (actual space will be lower do to space required by the operating system, etc)

Whilst the shell of the OPUS#1S is made from ABS plastic, the 4-inch 400×800 IPS touch panel is covered with a sheet of tempered glass.

The OPUS#1S is also available in 2 colors, namely Lapis Blue and Palatinate Purple.

The software is based on a highly-customised version of Android 5 which has apparently been optimised for portable audio devices. This also allows the OPUS#1S to support using external DAC devices (such as the Chord Mojo, IFI Micro iDSD BL, etc) via its micro-USB port. Whilst it doesn’t seem entirely clear yet, it is possible that users may be able to install third-party streaming apps such as Tidal and Spotify as well.

The internal 4000mAh battery requires around 4 hours to charge from dead flat, and should give the OPUS#1S a maximum playback time of roughly 11 hours.

Pricing

Thus far the OPUS#1S doesn’t seem to be widely available, but there is a limited supply on Amazon priced at $1100.