Summary
I really like the Fiio X7 MKII. It has a nice sized, very readable screen with options for different displays of the music being played, dual micro SD slots, a couple of options on included cases, good build quality and feel, and the option of balanced output with higher output than the unbalanced output. It has a few software peculiarities that I learned to get used to, but the occasional soft pop between gapless tracks will need a firmware/software change to really fix.
Test Equipment and Music
I used full sized closed-back Shure SRH1540’s, A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s, and Panasonic IEM EAH-Z70’s. The Shure and A&K’s have 2.5MM balanced cables. The gain on the X7 MKII was usually set to low on both the Shure and A&K’s, but was set to high gain for some music tracks with more bass. The Panasonic’s have a 3.5 MM unbalanced cable.
The music that I listened to for the testing was a mix of high resolution 24bit/88.2kHz, 24bit/96kHx and 24bit/192kHz flac tracks. Music genres were Jazz, Bluegrass, Blues, and Rock. All listening testing was through the balanced port. The battery test was through the unbalanced port and included high resolution and CD resolution flac tracks. All music listening and the battery test were done in Pure Music mode. I also compared the X7 MK II to an AK70 that I own.
The Testing Process
Battery Test
The battery test was very simple. The X7 MKII was started playing music at 100% battery. The music files played were 160 GB in size, which were about half high resolution flac and the other half CD resolution flac. All the songs (about 4000) in the player were played randomly. Gain was set to low and the music was played though the unbalanced port to the Panasonic EAH-Z70’s. The volume was set to 45. The screen brightness was set to the lowest value on the X7 MKII, and the screen was only turned on only for a few seconds every hour to check the battery level. The battery dropped at a relatively linear rate of about 10 percent per hour. After nine hours the battery showed 9 percent and the test was stopped to prevent any possibility of damage from a 100 percent battery drain. Although this was not how an X7 MKII would be typically used, because of very minimal screen usage, it did show that under the most ideal conditions the X7 could play music for almost ten hours.
About half way through the battery test the X7 completely stopped playing music in the middle of a song. This error was not found until playback had been stopped for about 20 minutes. The music player was restarted. The stopping and restarting did not seem to have affected the relatively linear progress of the battery drain of about 10 percent per hour.
Sound Quality Test
As a general rule I find that high resolution music sounds better to me than 16bit/44.1kHz music. I think this has more to do with additional detail available with 24bit information rather than the higher frequencies. All listening testing was with HD resolution music, and all listening was with the Shure SRH1540’s and the A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s with balanced output from the X7 MKII.
For critical listening on the X7 MKII I listened to:
Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, listened for bass detail.
Eric Clapton, Just One Night, listed for Eric Clapton supporting guitar and vocals in “Setting Me Up.” Albert Lee has lead guitar and vocals on this song.
B.B. King, Live At The Regal, listened for guitar details. B.B. played notes, not chords.
Muddy Waters, Folk Singer, listened for guitar and vocal details. This album is much more acoustic rather than electric guitar. Buddy Guy also plays on this album.
Allison Krauss, New Favorite, listened for vocal details. Allison’s beautiful voice really shows on this album.
Tierney Sutton, Dancing In The Dark, On The Other Side, and Something Cool; listened for vocal details. Tierney really shows her great voice with a wide variety of songs on these three albums.
Cannonball Adderley, Somethin’ Else; Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out; John Coltrane, A Love Supreme; Ray Brown Trio, Soular Energy; and Sonny Rollins, Way Out West; listened for musical detail (note decay), instrument separation, and sound stage. High quality recordings of jazz performances come very close to giving me the feeling of listening to a live performance. Listening to them helped me more than any other genre appreciate the musical quality of the X7 MKII.
Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon, listened for gapless playback, especially between “On The Run” and “Time.” Unfortunately, always heard a slight pop.
Except for slight errors in gapless playback, the X7 MKII produced excellent sound with all my listening tests. It has great sound quality and detail. All the details that I was listening for in my HD music, the X7 MKII reproduced in spectacular fashion. I really love it’s sound.
Comparison to A&K AK70
I own an A&K AK70 and listened to it back-to-back in comparison to the X7 MKII. For the music that I listened to, I had enough SD memory capacity to make this comparison possible. For almost all the HD music that I listened to, the AK70 and the X7 MKII produced similarly pleasing and detailed music reproduction with both the Shure SRH1540’s and the A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s.
There were two exceptions. The AK70 had no problems with gapless playback. The X7 MKII reproduced bass much, much better with the Shure SRH1540’s on songs that had a significant amount of bass. This was really apparent when playing Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms. The output from the X7 MII was with the balanced output with high gain to the Shure SRH1540’s.
Connection to External Music Server
I have a media server that runs JRiver Media Center software and had no problems connecting the X7 MII via wifi and playing music from the JRiver software. The way my system is configured, music via wifi never sounds as good music played directly on a device, so I did not perform any critical listening tests of the music from the server.
Firmware/Software Issues
In the process of copying songs to the X7 MKII and testing it, I found a few firmware/software issues. The most import one to me that needs fixing is the soft pop between songs on gapless playback. I feel confident that Fiio will fix this in future release.
Before beginning testing of the X7 MKII, I copied about 45 GB of HD music to the player. All the other music that I used was on a 128GB micro SD card. I had multiple interruptions caused by the X7 MKII when copying music directly to the player. It was very frustrating and caused the transfer to take much more time that it should have. I did not have problems when only copying a single album at a time.
When running my battery life test on the X7 MKII is stopped playing in the middle of the test. This was the only time that the X7 MKII stopped like this.
When starting a song or restarting a song after a pause, the X7 MKII had about a ¼ second delay before starting the song. After I figured out that this was occurring, it did not cause me any difficulties when listening to the X7 MKII.
At the very beginning of a song, when only a few sends of the song had been played, hitting the prior song button on the side of the player would cause the player to skip to the previous song rather than the song currently playing. Like the ¼ second delay, After I figured out that this was occurring, it did not cause me any difficulties when listening to the X7 MKII.
Final Comments
I very much appreciate Fiio providing the X7 MKII for testing and review. I really do like the sound quality, screen size, user interface, ability to drive my Shure SRH1540 headphones, and large music capacity of the player. Anyone considering a player in the $600 to $1,000 range should seriously consider the X7 MKII.
Fred Woolfrey
Rockport, TX
12 Nov, 2017
I really like the Fiio X7 MKII. It has a nice sized, very readable screen with options for different displays of the music being played, dual micro SD slots, a couple of options on included cases, good build quality and feel, and the option of balanced output with higher output than the unbalanced output. It has a few software peculiarities that I learned to get used to, but the occasional soft pop between gapless tracks will need a firmware/software change to really fix.
Test Equipment and Music
I used full sized closed-back Shure SRH1540’s, A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s, and Panasonic IEM EAH-Z70’s. The Shure and A&K’s have 2.5MM balanced cables. The gain on the X7 MKII was usually set to low on both the Shure and A&K’s, but was set to high gain for some music tracks with more bass. The Panasonic’s have a 3.5 MM unbalanced cable.
The music that I listened to for the testing was a mix of high resolution 24bit/88.2kHz, 24bit/96kHx and 24bit/192kHz flac tracks. Music genres were Jazz, Bluegrass, Blues, and Rock. All listening testing was through the balanced port. The battery test was through the unbalanced port and included high resolution and CD resolution flac tracks. All music listening and the battery test were done in Pure Music mode. I also compared the X7 MK II to an AK70 that I own.
The Testing Process
Battery Test
The battery test was very simple. The X7 MKII was started playing music at 100% battery. The music files played were 160 GB in size, which were about half high resolution flac and the other half CD resolution flac. All the songs (about 4000) in the player were played randomly. Gain was set to low and the music was played though the unbalanced port to the Panasonic EAH-Z70’s. The volume was set to 45. The screen brightness was set to the lowest value on the X7 MKII, and the screen was only turned on only for a few seconds every hour to check the battery level. The battery dropped at a relatively linear rate of about 10 percent per hour. After nine hours the battery showed 9 percent and the test was stopped to prevent any possibility of damage from a 100 percent battery drain. Although this was not how an X7 MKII would be typically used, because of very minimal screen usage, it did show that under the most ideal conditions the X7 could play music for almost ten hours.
About half way through the battery test the X7 completely stopped playing music in the middle of a song. This error was not found until playback had been stopped for about 20 minutes. The music player was restarted. The stopping and restarting did not seem to have affected the relatively linear progress of the battery drain of about 10 percent per hour.
Sound Quality Test
As a general rule I find that high resolution music sounds better to me than 16bit/44.1kHz music. I think this has more to do with additional detail available with 24bit information rather than the higher frequencies. All listening testing was with HD resolution music, and all listening was with the Shure SRH1540’s and the A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s with balanced output from the X7 MKII.
For critical listening on the X7 MKII I listened to:
Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms, listened for bass detail.
Eric Clapton, Just One Night, listed for Eric Clapton supporting guitar and vocals in “Setting Me Up.” Albert Lee has lead guitar and vocals on this song.
B.B. King, Live At The Regal, listened for guitar details. B.B. played notes, not chords.
Muddy Waters, Folk Singer, listened for guitar and vocal details. This album is much more acoustic rather than electric guitar. Buddy Guy also plays on this album.
Allison Krauss, New Favorite, listened for vocal details. Allison’s beautiful voice really shows on this album.
Tierney Sutton, Dancing In The Dark, On The Other Side, and Something Cool; listened for vocal details. Tierney really shows her great voice with a wide variety of songs on these three albums.
Cannonball Adderley, Somethin’ Else; Dave Brubeck Quartet, Time Out; John Coltrane, A Love Supreme; Ray Brown Trio, Soular Energy; and Sonny Rollins, Way Out West; listened for musical detail (note decay), instrument separation, and sound stage. High quality recordings of jazz performances come very close to giving me the feeling of listening to a live performance. Listening to them helped me more than any other genre appreciate the musical quality of the X7 MKII.
Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon, listened for gapless playback, especially between “On The Run” and “Time.” Unfortunately, always heard a slight pop.
Except for slight errors in gapless playback, the X7 MKII produced excellent sound with all my listening tests. It has great sound quality and detail. All the details that I was listening for in my HD music, the X7 MKII reproduced in spectacular fashion. I really love it’s sound.
Comparison to A&K AK70
I own an A&K AK70 and listened to it back-to-back in comparison to the X7 MKII. For the music that I listened to, I had enough SD memory capacity to make this comparison possible. For almost all the HD music that I listened to, the AK70 and the X7 MKII produced similarly pleasing and detailed music reproduction with both the Shure SRH1540’s and the A&K IEM T8iE MK II’s.
There were two exceptions. The AK70 had no problems with gapless playback. The X7 MKII reproduced bass much, much better with the Shure SRH1540’s on songs that had a significant amount of bass. This was really apparent when playing Dire Straits, Brothers In Arms. The output from the X7 MII was with the balanced output with high gain to the Shure SRH1540’s.
Connection to External Music Server
I have a media server that runs JRiver Media Center software and had no problems connecting the X7 MII via wifi and playing music from the JRiver software. The way my system is configured, music via wifi never sounds as good music played directly on a device, so I did not perform any critical listening tests of the music from the server.
Firmware/Software Issues
In the process of copying songs to the X7 MKII and testing it, I found a few firmware/software issues. The most import one to me that needs fixing is the soft pop between songs on gapless playback. I feel confident that Fiio will fix this in future release.
Before beginning testing of the X7 MKII, I copied about 45 GB of HD music to the player. All the other music that I used was on a 128GB micro SD card. I had multiple interruptions caused by the X7 MKII when copying music directly to the player. It was very frustrating and caused the transfer to take much more time that it should have. I did not have problems when only copying a single album at a time.
When running my battery life test on the X7 MKII is stopped playing in the middle of the test. This was the only time that the X7 MKII stopped like this.
When starting a song or restarting a song after a pause, the X7 MKII had about a ¼ second delay before starting the song. After I figured out that this was occurring, it did not cause me any difficulties when listening to the X7 MKII.
At the very beginning of a song, when only a few sends of the song had been played, hitting the prior song button on the side of the player would cause the player to skip to the previous song rather than the song currently playing. Like the ¼ second delay, After I figured out that this was occurring, it did not cause me any difficulties when listening to the X7 MKII.
Final Comments
I very much appreciate Fiio providing the X7 MKII for testing and review. I really do like the sound quality, screen size, user interface, ability to drive my Shure SRH1540 headphones, and large music capacity of the player. Anyone considering a player in the $600 to $1,000 range should seriously consider the X7 MKII.
Fred Woolfrey
Rockport, TX
12 Nov, 2017
