[droilfade]

Hi,
 
I hope someone can solve my conundrum. All these days I have been using a sansa clip+, but I passed it on to my brother and I'm looking for a new Audio player. I'm torn between buying a ipod classic (160 GB 7th gen) and an X3. I can rockbox the 7th gen to play FLAC and almost all other formats under the sun. 160 GB is big enough for my collection (no need of an extra SD card). What I want to know is which is a better sounding and a value for money product? Thanks in advance!

 

[mark2410]

well its depends. doesnt everything?

with the classic, you get more storage and you can amp it. with an amp itll get fairly good (though if your doing that the 5G ipods have a much bettre line out, smaller hdd though.)

if your not planing to amp then the X3 should sound easily better and you get to use it as a nice little DAC/amp for your computer, which is very nice and makes it pretty great value.

 

[droilfade]

I did bite the bullet and bought an X3 and I'm glad I did. It is a nice DAC and a better player than classic, imho. Although I have a E7 it is dying on me so the X3 would be a good replacement. I agree with your review about UI and is really cumbersome to navigate. What I absolutely don't like is not being able to make playlists! At the moment, I'm loving the X3

 

[JLuecking]

Hi Mark2410,
 
Nice review!
 
I bought the X3 recently replacing the Sansa Fuze. I use a modded Creative Aurvana Live! when I commute and a modded Denon AH D1001 at the office with a Fostex HP-A3 modded with an OPA627 and an Aqvox Power Supply. Link for Markl type Headphone mod is found here. Both headphones are stuffed so the sound is well balanced and the bass does neither stand out nor looses its pressure (no pad lift mod applied, no cable replaced). The CAL! sound more compact and livelier with an impressive bass, the Denons sound a bit brighter, more distant with a nicer sound stage and more relaxed. On the Fostex with the Denons I use the Koss Adapter from the Porta Pro, which is drier, a bit darker and the bass ends up to be a bit tighter in comparison with the supplied adapter from Denon or Creative. The Creative Adapter is a perfect match for the CAL! and corresponds in sound signature to the X3 output. The lively sound of the CAL! is a perfect match for Fiio X3, perfect tonality and enjoyable. Yet at the office, I was able to increase sound quality using the X3 as a digital source to the Fostex. I convert the digital signal from coax to optical using the Oehlbach converter which is excellent. I also use high quality coax and optical cables.
 
I listen to a lot of HiRes music of different genres. Classical, soul, pop, jazz, etc.. I also upsample CDs to 24/96 using Foobar2000 and Secret Rabbit Resampler Plugin (Download Link). For the Fostex it is best to resample everything beforehand to 2496 (The internal resampler did not convince me.). For using just the X3 upsampling CDs to 88.2 kHz should be ok. I prefer 96/88.2 kHz even over 192/176.2 kHz, that might be a matter of taste. I miss the playlist function and memory/resume not always working is an issue. Also the fast forward with long tracks (classical ac3 recordings from DVB converted to flac) could be faster. But using a cue file is a good workaround.
 
Some purchased material has embedded pictures which are so big that this causes problems with the X3. I reduce them in size, this helps (300x300 pixels for example). Two other tricks which worked for me to increase sound quality is to set gain to high and to use an accu pack as an external power supply. The accu pack should be powerful enough to charge tablets (2A), standard power adapters from regular smart phones do not help alot.
 
So the X3 may also work extremely well with less costy headphone and using the X3 as a digital source to replace your computer you can get marvellous results.
 
Enjoy
Joachim

 

[mark2410]

cool, yeah its nifty little device isnt it.  mucho versatility

 

[Texasbear]

FiiO's X3 Disappointment and lack of support.

I purchased this device with high hopes as it was under the $300.00 USD range. I have to say that I own a few different FiiO products and have never had any issues with any of them at all. That was not the case with this particular device. It is sort of complicated to set up from the start. I managed to do this by using the YouTube videos that the company recommended. I bought this back in December of 2013.

I finally got the hang of the set up using a smaller SD card formatted to the required FAT 32 or what ever it was to install the Firmware update to the latest version. After installing the firmware, it showed it loading and gave me a completed message. I proceeded to download about 50 gbs of music to the SD card that was formatted. All the files were in Flac format and most at 24/96 as this is the highest rate my receiver will play from my server.

After about a week or so, I started noticing that the device would just hang up and no matter how you pushed the buttons, you where still locked. I decided to reset the device on the top of the unit through a small pinhole.
It played fine for about another week, but it started hanging up about every 45 minutes. If you look at Amazon, mostly the one and two star ratings, you will see that a lot of people have had this issue. I tried formatting and reinstalling the original firmware, then the most recent and it still is doing the same thing. I contacted FiiO and have not heard back from them on the issue. Another buyer had a post that said he was having the same issues and he got support, the tech at FiiO told him to reinstall the old version over and over, then reinstall the latest version over and over like three times. He bought an Astell&Kern , which is what I am planning to do.

I am not sure if it is just a few that are doing this or the five star people just have not changed their ratings. My advice is to skip this one all together and you know the old saying, you get what you pay for.

Texasbear

 

[Eric95M]

Will the X3 play Apple M4A format?  Am getting an error when it hits those files.  Everything else is fine.
Thank you

 

[mark2410]

are you sure those tracks arent DRM'd?