FAQ and Advice of X3

[JamesFiiO]

for lithium polymer battery which used in X3 and other device, the best way is keep it charged all the time. the charging circuit will stop charing when the battery become fully charged.

 

[elektrikgypsy]

Hi James
 
I received my X3 a couple of days ago, and have been listening to it almost constantly while out and about working. Wonderful sound, well done; I would have expected nothing less. It even manages my 250ohm DT770s fine. Great. However.... 
 
I bought it to upgrade my existing portable rig, consisting of an old gen iPod Nano through a LoD into a MontBlanc and thence to V-Moda M80s. This gave me great sound, mainly because one of the eq presets on the iPod notched the upper midrange down on the M80s making them much more listenable (to my ears). 
 
I can't do this with the X3, so the headphones become fatiguing after a while. I've been following the poll requesting parametric eq, and you've indicated it's easy; if it's defeatable so the purists won't object, is this feature scheduled for inclusion in an upcoming FW update? The topic seems to have gone cold, but it's a big deal to me. SQ is irrelevant if the EQ is unlistenable!  Rough date for inclusion?

 

[JeffAustin]

Comment re: ReplayGain moved to another post.

 

[JeffAustin]

   
 
I see, will discuss it with our engineers .

Thank you James. I too would like to see the X3 support ReplayGain.

 

[GuidoF]

   
the new firmware will support more cover format, please give us more time cause we just release 2.05 and working in the firmware for X5.

 
Hello James:
 
Excellent! Please try to put this on your front burner. I updated to firmware 2.1 and note that there is still no display of <cover.jpg> art. It is NOT a major issue, but it sure detracts from what is otherwise a great DAP. Thank you.
 
Regards,
 
Guido F.

 

[audibit]

Hi James,

some days ago I bought an X3 and immediately updated the firmware to FW2.1. I am very pleased about this device and specially about the ability of running as both, a USB-DAC on a Linux system and as a DMP standalone. One device for high quality audio with or without a PC is IMHO the optimum flexibility you can get. Great.

So the following points are just things that I noticed and that are all no serious impact to the usability. Please don't regard them as criticism, but rather as observations and maybe wishes for future firmware versions:

• Category => Album => Title of Album => shows titles in random (maybe plain FS-DIR) order. Neither alphabetic by file name nor by track ID tag. It would be nice if sorted first by track-ID and second by file name (if no track-ID is given).
• Some times the gapless function cuts off a little (<1s) of the end of a track. Unfortunately I have not been able to reproduce this clearly.
• System Settings => Storage formatting => External storage formatting. This creates an invalid FSINFO signature: 0x00000000, 0x00000000 at sector 1 of FAT32 on TF.
• Using blanks in file system labels is usually disliked by Unix/Linux users. The label is usually used as a directory name of the mountpoint. The blank is used as delimiter and thus needs to be escaped in every absolute path referring an X3 file. Better use "X3_TF" (with underline character) instead of "X3 TF".
• Playing an MP3 file with a sync error in the data completely stops playing on X3. Same file on other DAPs is just causing a short 'chirp' sound but continues playing. The best behaviour is just a silent skip (e.g. as done by mpg123) or correction if possible. Being fault tolerant is not necessary but will increase the reliability which I read is one of Fiios declared cornerstone design principles. On the other hand trying to be fault tolerant can be a very hard battle as faults are so manifold. So I understand that development efforts on this issue are limited. But there are people using this device for playback on stage and in this case even the chirp is better than just stopping.
• Red pixel with loose contact. Presumably just on this one device that I received and maybe just a Monday display.

Using SQLite as indexing database is a very good idea. I'm not sure, but would it make sense to store one database per file system? This would enable replacing the TF without rescanning the hole content. A drawback would be the splitted index. But merging these would be much faster than rescanning the hole content. In my opinion nearly perfect would be a database merge on demand if TF change has being detected. Especially if you really think about implementing USB host mode (OTG), this would be an interesting issue. It would also enable scanning with a PC tool for large file systems before connecting to the X3.

Best regards and thank you for providing this great device

Manfred

PS: I have a small (10s) sample to clearly reproduce this sync issue, but although this is an audio forum I can only include images and videos in this posting. And as a new member I am not even allowed to upload images and havn't had the time to go into forum details.

 

[AgentXXL]

FYI

James hasn't been answering any questions because he's been fighting some health issues. Sounds like he's on the road to recovery though... continued well wishes James! May your journey on the road to good health be a short one!

http://www.head-fi.org/t/693309/fiio-newsflash-james-latest-firmware-update-cures-cancer-we-hope

Dale

 

[audibit]

Thank you Dale for this hint. Let's hope that James is defeating his illness as successful as he is developing audio devices. All the best wishes to James.