Thanks James for doing this, I have been following this and putting thoughts together. I don't post much but I own a lot of FiiO products so would love to see something from you fulfill my wishes!
I will leave the tech details to others (many folks on here much, much smarter than I) but in terms of my dream player I would like something like the X5 in size (can go slightly bigger if needed). Pocket size is nice to have, especially in the car, train, plane, etc. I am thinking that I have a player that I can take with me without a DAC/AMP stack with good enough quality (again, people can argue that all day, but enough to have great sound). In certain situations (like at home) I might want to "play" around with my other DACs and amps to add to it so take that into consideration. Sometimes a player only, sometimes it is everything!
I would really like it to have WiFi so that apps like Spotify, Pandora, Beats (really good for music discovery I find) could be installed. I would assume this means an Android based build. In my mind I want this to be the center of my music universe, I can add songs, stream music, connect it to PC, connect to stereo, stream to a speaker, connect a DAC or another amp.
so then it comes to the UI. It should be easy and intuitive of course. I like the tactile feedback of buttons but a touch screen has some real nice benefits. A mix would be ok and maybe preferred. So, you can still use "buttons" for volume, advancing tracks or ? Maybe side buttons for volume with a lock and a play/pause, adv/rev track button on opposite side with touch screen in middle. Search would be important. As most people have huge song loads, it would be nice to type in a name and get artist or song or album. Playlist support is a must and I would like to see the ability to create a playlist on the fly.
Price for something like this, should be based on quality of HW more than anything I suppose. 500 would be an ideal target I think. It would be a flagship product so if an X7 is coming then would this be an X9? If X5 is 400 and X7 is 500 then is this 600? Again, that will be determined by a lot of factors but I would suggest a real game changer could be a big hit not only with the head-fi crowd but many others as well.
Thanks!