Ok Folks,
It's time to share with you my little expérience with the X3 Mark III and if you don't like to read a bit, here is my conclusion : don't buy this thing yet because it is not a finished product but a prototype ! Don't be a beta tester and choose another brand...
1st, overall build quality for a 199$ price point device is really good and you will feel having a nice High-End player in the hands.
But this is ending there for the nice part of this informal review. This device is so buggy that it is a pain in the ass to simply use it. You will have almost all the time between 1s to 3s delay with commands response. How can they push to release and market a device like this ? I don't know, but a 15 bucks mp3 player can work surely faster ! I cannot stand that for a 200$ tag, I cannot have a fluid and flawless device ! For me, this is simply unbearable. This is why i was talking about a prototype. And don't tell me that a better SoC is so expensive that it will ruin FiiO to put it inside. No way for me to endure this for years on a product... And if devs cannot optimize this product, I won't have to wait for a hypothetic update, my solution will be to simply return this product and wait for the Shanling M3s !
Now, let's talk about sound... Well, my ears are not well trained like some guys on this forum, but I am a hobbyist musician playing on a Tyros with nice sounds and with M-Audio mid-end monitors... So, I have some basic knowledge of what it may sounds like or near to...
I think that it is a nice player but for me, too round and smooth and I had to make little EQ settings to get a better response with it and more separation for the scene, but I can agree that this is relative to everyone's taste. I noticed a little breath sound in the background with some titles that I couldn't noticed on my computer at 192Khz/24bit.
And now, the part that annoys ! You don't have your full music playing ! Amazing that when a track is skipped or on some transition from one track to another, you're loosing near 0.5s to 1s of your starting track !!! And I am not talking about the blast and sound defects with glitches when you come from a DSD file to a FLAC format or simply when you play from another folder ! You get a big blast in your ears that "pop" so loud that I nearly fell from my chair the 1st time it happens ! Seriously ? We are talking about a Hi-Res device that must be irreproachable with the sound ! And we simply have none at all !!! At this time, no gapless, no filters, no APT-X, no DSD256, no DxD, no correctly working album cover, no good exploitation of hardware, no equalizer working at all sampling rates, and so on... This list is impressive when you look at the competition with other brands. How can they put a buggy firmware from last iteration onto this without correcting it ? Are we monkeys ?
Software part is so laggy (even more when playing a title) that the touch scrolling wheel is not easy to use. Music playback stops when you plug your usb cable. As is out of the box, this device is not usable ! Even my old iRiver iHP140 is more capable to play correctly a title (and gapless) that this "thing" from another world. Responsiveness is mandatory for a nowadays device ! And talking about file copy over USB, this is the same on my iRiver (13y old) near 2.2Mo/s, a shame...
In conclusion, I will return this product asap to the shop I bought it from to buy the next Shanling M3s when it will be there... I cannot use it in this conditions... I now understand why there was no test outside FiiO communication for this product...
Excuse me, I'm french, nobody is perfect, so accept my apologies for my awful english ^^
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