Thought I would share my thoughts on the X3 2nd gen compared to my original one after having had it for a few months.
A little dissapointed overall, but there are some advantages, and I will list them first.
Slight sound quality improvement. It does seem to have more clarity than my old X3, but the X3's warmer sound just happens to suit all of my rather bass light headphones.
The player itself looks a lot nicer - I like using it partly because of the look and style of it.
Despite not being that keen on the wheel initially, I've got used to it, and although I still prefer the buttons of the original X3, navigation is far better on the X3II, and you still have options to use buttons as up and down arrows, which is nice. You also have a search feature for the library and can pick a letter to navigate to artists more quickly. Helps when you have not far off 200!
Interface when using as a DAC is far better and can accsess most of the sound settings - can only adjust bass, treble and volume on the old X3.
Now onto quite a lot of the things I'm not keen on:
The default themes are pretty terrible in terms of readability of the tiny font, on a poor choise of background colour vs the text. Luckily custom themes have solved this, but the default X3 themes were certainly better.
Lack of Bass / Treble adjustment. I love the original X3 for having + and -10db for bass and treble. Very useful for tuning if the frequency that it adjusts happens to match what you require. The EQ on the new X3 is 10 band rather than 5, but it has such a drastic volume drop off the more you adjust which really is a negative for me. It also messes up the other frequencies up as lot more then the bass/treble does on the original X3. The EQ just seems to compress the sound too much, unless making very minor changes.
Confort when holding - I feel the old X3 is almost unbeatable in terms of confort when holding. It is so well shaped with the beveld edges rtaher than 90 degree corners making it a rather boxy shape. The new X3 looks better, but just not nice to hold in comparison.
Volume - It is noticeably quieter then my original X3. I was prepared for it to be a bit quieter, but not by as much as it is. When the EQ is in use and I use it with my K550s, I'm usually on gigh gain and between 110 and 115 in volume, which is really close to the maximum. On my old X3, I could stay on low gain and keep it well under 110. A bit of a shame really.
Locking - the locking feature is really annoying on this. No matter what, when the screen goes off, you must always press one specific button to regain full access to all the other buttons (by pressing the power button) You can set it to allow you to do things like volume, skip track and play/pause while locked, but all other functions, you must press the power button first. So it is impossible to fast forward in a track without pressing the power button first if you have left the device to the point where the screen goes off, which usually you would do when listening to music! Lack of thought went into this. The old X3 has a lock switch, which when off, allows any button to wake the device up, then any button will preform it's action, and a flick of the physical lock disables all buttons entirely (excluding the reset hole and a press and hold of the power button)
Battery life - another area where sadly it isn't as good despite claiming is has a longer batter life. But it does havea smaller battery.
And another thing that isn't too much of an issue, but it lacks seperate line out and coax outputs like the old X3 has.
My list could go on, and there are more positives too. You may wonder why I bought it 2nd hand, but I'm still pretty happy with it overall. I got it as a back up incase my old X3 dies due to being nearly 10 years old. And I still think that the X3II will be very good when I get round to getting some new headphones that are easier to drive and have more impact to the low end than my K550s have. Then I think I would use it more often.
But most of the time now, I still use my old X3 for a good 8 hours at least every week and sometimes a lot more. The battery life of this thing is stunning. It must have had around 800 charging cycles by now.
Mainly posted in this thread as it is the one I know and I'm just strangely in a way pleased that I still really like the original one!
