FiiO E17 "ALPEN" - First Impression + Final Thought - Page 112

Quote:

Originally Posted by gEaK 
 

I'd really like to know when mp4nation is due to receive their next shipment, and how many units it will contain.

I believe Feiao said earlier in the thread that the next shipment is in early March and would be about 5,000 units.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gEaK 

Hmm, I assumed Fiio would have told the dealers that they would supply X amount of units on whatever date.

 

Feiao also gave dates of availability in this thread, which were later pushed back.

 

I'm trying not to make a huge deal out of this as I believe both sides are partially at fault. It's a little annoying however when it seems as soon as anyone utters a negative word about Fiio they get jumped on.

 

Believe it or not I am still a fan of Fiio as well as a consumer, though this is an unfortunate situation. It would help a lot if myself and all the other people waiting could get some concrete information. I've PM'd both Cathy and Feiao as well as numerous retailers and recieved nothing of signifigance.

 

I'd really like to know when mp4nation is due to receive their next shipment, and how many units it will contain.

I'm not trying to aggravate you, just inform you.  Re-reading the thread I can find no evidence of the dates being pushed back. In post #1019 Feiao mentioned that batch 1 consisted of 2 shipments, the first of which arrived at dealers during the week of Jan. 20th. The 2nd half of batch #1 is just arriving at dealers now. Batch #2 has always been stated as shipping from Fiio by middle March, to be available for sale at dealers by the end of March - see post #1478. There are other dates quoted in the thread but they were posts from other forum members talking about dates they got from their respective dealers - heck, those other dates even confused me.

Also note that in post #1545 Feiao announced that batch #1 contained 1000 units and batch #2 will contain 5000 units. It was also stated that there is a lead time of about 1.5 months between batch #1 and batch #2. Based on these posts, it doesn't look like there has been any delay on Fiio's end, other than the delay expected by Chinese New Year. As for when mp4nation is due to receive their next shipment, hopefully they'll have received some soon from the 2nd half of batch #1. Hopefully you pre-ordered early enough from mp4nation that you'll get yours from the 2nd half of batch #1. If not, unfortunately you'll have to wait until batch #2 arrives at dealers and starts shipping to customers at the end of March.

Hope that helps clarify, but as you and others have seen, this thread has become remarkably difficult to follow with people misinterpreting comments and not reading the comments as written. Regardless, when you get yours, you'll hopefully have a lot of fun with it. I'm certainly enjoying mine - just had a great experience listening to some old ELO from a decent FLAC rip. Awesome stuff! 

Can I use this amp for my ipod and laptop? If so do I need to buy the L line dock what ever the cable thingy?

(New user post, skip as necessary)

First, a HUGE thank you to feiao, bowie006, ClieOS, Jack-Micca, AgentXXL, and all the others that have made this thread informative, sometimes entertaining, and (almost) always even tempered. Yes, I've read the whole thread. (SoundDreamer - I'm glad you stuck with it long enough to finally get an E17 ordered!)

I drive a truck (I pulled off at a rest stop at 3PM EST and got my wi-fi going so I could get my order in for the E17 at the micca site... successfully I'm glad to say!) I got a notification today (22nd) that it has cleared the USPS sorting in Virginia.

In my free time I've been organizing a lot of mp3s I've downloaded over the years using J. Rivers Media Center. I listened to The Beatles 1 album and it sucked rocks. I didn't remember it being like that, so I downloaded a 320 version. Better, but it still blared in the vocal range and washed out the instruments. I played with my laptop's sound controls and got it sounding better, but still bad. Well, long story short I started really listening to other albums as I organized them, and figured I needed better headphones. I searched the web (I'm a black-belt level googler) and came up with AKG K702s. I ordered them, and then decided I wanted more control over what drives them. So I looked for a headphone pre-amp. I was about to get a small desktop amp from (I can't remember the company name, starts with k) and was looking into their replaceable op-amps. (Rolling I believe they called it, as in roll your own.)

Well, then I saw a review for the Alpen and fell in love.  (I'm a die-hard nut for new stuff.) That was about midnight on Feb 20. I searched the sites that FiiO sells through and found them unhelpful and messy. I found the tweet telling about them shipping a bunch to micca though, so I sent an e-mail to micca asking when they'd be available. Went to bed. Next morning, I continued looking for reviews on the Alpen and found the tweet about 3PM Eastern. My trip for the day kept me on the highway, so I was able to pull off at 3PM and spam the site... and I got one. :D

Knowing how I am, I know I'm going to get into FLAC etc which means I'll have to buy a sixth and seventh 2 terabyte external drive from Walmart (I think my first download will be Norah Jones Sunrise) and I'm really impressed with the people here. So, once my cans and amp get here, I'm going to post how the E17 sounds, how long it takes the K702s to settle in and how the sound changes, and all that stuff.

By the way, there were a couple of people asking about the K701 line and the E17... there was a post from someone who has both in this thread and he said they sounded great. From the review I saw, the guy felt that using the dock amp with the E17 pushed the lows and highs up too much (can't remember what phones he had.) So I think I'll leave the E17 by itself. Eventually I'll likely get whatever FiiO upgrades their dock amp to... I'll likely be off the road by then and back to a desktop. Then I'll want an amp to drive a satellite surround setup. The E17 will always be there when I go out on road trips though. :)

Forgive my ignorance here people, but I have a few questions (sorry for that). I am going to be using my DT 770 80 ohm with a 5th Gen iPod, which is supposed to have a good DAC in it (at least compared to newer generations of iPods). If I purchased an E17, would the DAC even be used with the iPod, or does the iPod DAC do the conversion? I admit my ignorance freely. My other related question would be this: is the DAC in the iPod I mentioned (5th gen Video) good enough that I could simply purchase the E11 and be just as well ahead? I notice the E17s are in backorder, but the E11 is available from the Canadian distributor. Any thoughts are appreciated, I have never bothered to learn much about portable rigs and I need to catch up. Cheers.

Quote:

Originally Posted by xxhaxx 

Try updating your audio driver

Trust me... I have tried every thing under the sun.  Including an updated driver set (nope), Windows x64 instead of x86 (nope), Ubuntu (works), and using ASIO in Windows (made it worse).  Though changing latency in ASIO changed the type of static, it never eliminated it.  I assume it is just a latency issue on my USB host.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gohanssjn 

Trust me... I have tried every thing under the sun.  Including an updated driver set (nope), Windows x64 instead of x86 (nope), Ubuntu (works), and using ASIO in Windows (made it worse).  Though changing latency in ASIO changed the type of static, it never eliminated it.  I assume it is just a latency issue on my USB host.

Still happening huh? Have you ever encountered it using the optical input? I'm not hearing the noise anymore using optical.

@gohanssjn Go into the power options and set it to high performance (or whatever equivalent you can find.) This is a shot in the dark...

Excellent post, that helped explain a lot.

I was getting confused/frustrated as originally advancedmp3players were advertising pre-orders for the 2nd of Feb, which later changed to the 16th of March.

At the same time mp4nation were advertising pre-orders for the middle of Feb, which later changed to March. I believe they did receive some units, but these went to the people who pre-ordered and didn't receive one the first time round.

Hopefully I'll hear something from mp4nation soon, I'm considering placing a pre-order at advancedmp3players too as a back up.

Wow so it's back in stock at Amazon UK being sold by "AVShop" but it's £35 ($55) more expensive than mp4nation. As tempting as it is I'm not going for it out of principle.

Strangely too, the original price before the "saving" is listed as being £183 ($286) more than double the price at mp4nation, crazy.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mister2d 

Still happening huh? Have you ever encountered it using the optical input? I'm not hearing the noise anymore using optical.

My laptop does not have optical.  USB or headphone jack only.

Desktop works fine.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RoadKam 

@gohanssjn Go into the power options and set it to high performance (or whatever equivalent you can find.) This is a shot in the dark...

Tried, no change.  It's something base level on this laptop.