Thanks for the review. I have the Hd-598's also & started out with the default low output setting. However when I set it to high the 598's really came alive.

Thanks for the review!

Yes Thanks also from me.

Thanks a lot for the Linux guide for DSD!

you're very welcome!

Very useful guide. Thank you.

Regarding X3 2nd gen as a DAC, did you ever have any issues with Linux recognizing it? I've tried on my laptop, and something goes awry (probably with the kernel) to the point where I need to reboot the system... Can't figure out what's wrong...

Hi
the kernel shouldn't be the problem, I encountered some problems with the X3 at first, but after I disabled pulseaudio everything worked fine.

Do you mean you had such issues with the X3 2nd gen? Because on a different computer I have no trouble using X3 1st gen with pulseaudio...

And if you disable pulseaudio, how do you control which applications connect to the USB DAC? Thanks!

well, it depends what you're using. I am using KDE, which controlcenter is kmix, this is able to control ALSA...

I had those problems, and they didn't occur with the first gen.

Aha, so it's really some new issue FiiO has introduced in the 2nd gen...

I'm using Xfce4, but their mixer is sometimes a bit unhelpful.

yep, heard it a few times actually. someone said in an ubuntu forum that he solved it by disabling all USB 3 ports and mapping them to the USB 2 controller via BIOS

It seems these issues have already been discussed rather extensively in the X3 2nd gen thread:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/743704/the-fiio-x3-2nd-gen-ex-x3k-x3ii-thread-192k-24b-cs4398-native-dsd-usb-dac-with-lo-and-inline-remote/2580

The user in the top-most post suggests "enabl[ing] alsa passthrough w/ no resampling "direct hardware FiiO X3 no conversions"". Do you have any experience with this? Is this something that can be configured on /etc/pulse/daemon.conf level?