Great review. Very thorough and insightful. I only watched one of the videos (the how to use/navigation one), but very helpful, too
I thought your criticism of usability was well-balanced. ID3 tags have been the standard for a while now. Certainly there are people with music collections are a mess when it comes to tagging, but building a player that the music browsing is effective if ID3 tags are good seems reasonable to me.
Nope, all files with id3 tags on the SD(no matter where) and internal storage are auto catagorized.
Please go into the player settings and go to Update library and click ok. This will then manually update your library
The slight mid range thinning is less than desireable, but I don't think it is really that much of a difference for most users. The only real way these things are noticed are when you compare it to other units and do a review on them.
I could have been clearer.
The bass and treble adjustment in the menu. You demonstrated in the video the ability to turn it up (I think up to +10) using the + button from 0. That will boost the bass and treble. But what about reducing the bass and treble from flat? Can the the - button be used to go to -10?
Oh yep
Bass, Treble and channel balance are all +-10 meaning you can go up 10 and go down 10
If you need to reencode your library, you could use foobar or dbpoweramp/your encoder to enable replay gain?That's awesome.
Now if I could only talk FiiO into implementing the replaygain (volume leveling). I'm a shuffle the genre or listen to a big playlist kind of person (I almost never listen to albums). I haven't used a DAP without that feature in five or six years. I really love using an mp3 player while I'm walking around or otherwise doing stuff without pulling it out of my pocket for like an hour.
)... Hopefully they add the function to go artist -> album -> track as well. Shucks.
Fantastic thorough reviewBut am I to understand there's no shuffle all? I was gonna get one for the gf, and she doesn't really do the album thing (try finding a woman that does
If you need to reencode your library, you could use foobar or dbpoweramp/your encoder to enable replay gain?
I had to re encode some of my songs from lossless to lossy for the X3(not worth the space) and you could do replay gain there
Popular Comparisons:
These use the FiiO X3’s line out so that the DAC remains the same while only the amp sections changes.
FiiO E12 - FiiO X3
First of all, the FiiO E12 boasts better transparency in the sense that it sounds more natural than the X3. This is in part due to the mid subduing the X3 does to the instruments. This allows for the E12’s mid range to come off as more forward and apparent than the X3’s. The background of the E12 is also much better than the X3’s. The background of the E12 is much more cleaner. I mean by this that there is more noise and closeness of instruments in the ‘background’ with the X3 than the E12. The E12’s also offer a vocal range that is brought back down, this makes it sound colder(although not the same as neutral), and cleaner than the X3 which makes the vocals more musical. There is also more boom in the bass of the X3 than the E12. Pretty expectable results in my opinion.
