The MP101 arrived yeaterday, but I didn't get much time to try it till just before lunchtime today. It looked to have the album search in the standard firmware, although I ran the upgrade anyway.
My wife seemed to like the Artist/Album/Genre search ui via remote control and the 3-line lcd display. We'll wait to see how much it get's used in the living room though.
I only did a quick test of a few tracks via headphones, then plugged it's line-out in to my Denon AVC-A10SE AV amp and bi-amped active Linn Keilidh floorstanders just for testing.
In my usual 'stereo' mode, the analog input to the AV amp will be ADC'd at 20-bit, before 32-bit digital bass management, then pre-outs to the subwoofer and Linn Active Crossover Tunebox, then 4 pre-outs to the bass and treble amps.
Bear in mind the MP101 doesn't have digital oututs unlike it's Roku SoundBridge and Slim squeezebox double priced competitors, so an external DAC isn't a standard option.
I haven't matched levels to what I normally listen at or A/B compared to my normal 24-bit upsampling CD source, I hope to get time for that tonight.
Sound quality is enjoyable, treble is good and clean, bass is ok, certainly as good as I'd hoped and better than I feared it might be. Soundstaging and 'follow-the-tune' were fine.
I'd say the deepest sub-bass fundamentals are a little lacking, but it may just be lower listening levels I used briefly. I do have a rather large active sub, tuned down to 22Hz, so I'm used to a pretty full bottom octave. I'd say it sounded like good bookshelf speakers, as opposed to big floorstanders, let alone big activ floorstanders and a big sub.
I suspect it may be less open an detailed to my normal source, it also sounded quite loud for the 84dB-C average I measured briefly, without as much detail being apparent.
I did notice it skipped one a few older 256Kbps MP3's whereas there was no noticeable skipping any of the variable-bitrate (VBR 210Kbps +/- 25Kbps) --alt-preset standard LAME 3.90.3 encoded MP3 tracks (recommended by hydrogenaudio, and very, very high quality)
I hope to conclude more on it's ultimate sound quality tonight.
cheers,
Rob.