[nmatheis]

I think they've got all hands on deck for the latest X3 official FW release. A lot of guys chomping on the bit over there.

 
Probably true.  I'm part of the beta program, and the X3 is coming along nicely 

 

[Muenchener]

   
Honest question for you Muenchener (and I'm sure it's one that many other members of this thread echo)
 
Can you give it a rest with the innuendo and caustic comments?  You've said your piece (over, and over, and over, and over .......... ).
 
Again - like my previous post to krayziehustler - why don't we put things in perspective:
 

• This is Fiio's 2nd DAP - first the X3, now the X5.  How mature do you expect the software and firmware to be?  They don't have the years experience that most of the major DAP makers do.
• There were a heap of reviews before the X5 was released that pretty accurately described it's shortcomings.  If you didn't properly research the product - the issue is yours, not Fiio's.
• Fiio has repeatedly connected with their customer base, and acted to improve the UI and features of the X5.  They've released a heap of updates so far - and look as though they will continue to do so.  They're learning all the time - and this will be giving them valuable experience for not only future updates, but also future DAPs.  How about giving them a chance - instead of being a typical keyboard warrior and sniping behind the safety of a keyboard.  Instead of comparing them to DAP makers who've had years of experience (and who have massive resources) - how about looking at how far they've come?
• Just because there are features you think are indispensable doesn't mean the rest of us share this rating of what they should or shouldn't be doing.  Fiio are a business - and they need to fix the things that the majority want.  To do anything else is irresponsible to their own shareholders.

 
I'd challenge you to do two things:

1. Find another Hi-Res DAP in the sub $400 range that has features that are even remotely close to what the X5 is giving us.
2. Find (and link) where Fiio has deliberately misled any of the X5 buyers.  Then think about your comment above!

 
Enough is enough (IMO).  File a bug or contact Fiio directly.  But please stop the cheap shots.  Fiio don't deserve it - and I'd hate to think they would stop (or cut back) their interaction with the community because of "the few".

An honest question deserves an honest answer. I still have to hear from anybody at Fiio about the many different bugs that remain. At least a timeline or an official response.
All I read is people defending the brand for the sake of it, defending the brand because they have some non-disclosed interest on it, people genuinely declaring they are fine with the state of things or complaining about many things regarding the X5. Only the two last groups add value to this thread.

If you don't want more critics or complains, why don't you ask for the thread to be closed? There really is nothing good left to be said, as it has been said already by someone, somewhere in the 640 pages. I believe Fiio can learn a lot from all the comments, complains, advices, ideas and the like.

I don't know why you could ever think that a person has to heavily research a DAP before buying it, while reading countless reviews and endless pages on a thread like this to know what they are getting into. We passed 640 pages on this thread alone and people still write about new bugs or errors or things that nobody knows how to solve. The X5 bugzilla is useless as it is old and not updated.
I'll give you the point 1 you make; fair enough, but the market don't give a damn about Fiio's shortcomings or beginner's status. The second point is a joke. Sorry, but I don't agree. Point 3 is also fair, although I don't think like you. Point 4 is again your point of view and not mine. Fiio misled all buyers of the X5 and the E12 by not warning them that they will lose the balance control if used as a combo. It's not a big misled, and I don't think for a moment that they did it on purpose, but they make me and several others return the E12 because of that.

I don't believe in "just wait for the update" as the only reasonable answer from a company's fan's (nor from the company itself, but they won't respond in time). I believe in bringing official information, in giving answers, solutions, tips, upgrade deadlines, and taking care of the domino effect you get when you just let the people deal with the problems by themselves alone. Take a look at the X5's web site and please tell me if what they say they are selling is not missing a few bits of truth regarding the firmware, that turns out to be essential for the experience. And I'm telling you this with just a few non-important bugs on my X5.

All the right things that the X5 does do not cancel out the things that are wrong. I love the X5, but I won't hide my disappointment because of that. Why all has to be binary, either right or not, choose-a-side-and-stick-there, with nothing in between?

I respect that you see the good in the X5, and I see it too, as I ordered 2 units, and enjoy one of them. And I think that the X5 is the best DAP for the money, so I don't need to accept your challenge. But different things are different things, and I prefer to keep them apart.
 
"The few" are not so few.

 

[CH23]

Muenchener

When was the last time apple announced firmware updates and bugfixes?
Or any flaws at all on their device?

Are you telling me you don't have a learning curve to use an iphone or ipod?

And for what reason SHOULDN'T you research the products you buy?

Line out is line out, there should be nothing in the way, such as a volume meter, equaliser, etcetera.

You say there's nothing positive left to say, but somehow you don't realise that you've been saying the same negative things over and over and over and over.

At this point it seems like you're more trying to just overrule the overall user experience of the many with your own.

We acknowledge that you have trouble with the device, now please stop posting the same thing on every page in this thread.


(Where i put apple/ipod/iphone, you could put any manufacturer and any device)

 

[pe3ucTop]

  All I'm saying is that the user should not have to figure things out of thin air and online research. If you feel you are guilty of having done a lousy job with the learning curve that should not exist in the first place, be my guest. I respect whatever feelings you may have about it. I don't want to spoil anything for you, believe me.

If the X5 have some very specific settings than can go wrong if not followed, Fiio is responsible for making those requisites very clear to the end user. They didn't.
 

Learning curve shouldn't exist? I have never bought any piece of electronics that didn't need some learning curve on my part. Not iphones, not new TVs, not DAPs. Pretty much anything that has its own interface requires a learning curve from the user. And to be fair, the X5's learning curve was pretty short - one 10 minutes read through the manual and 10 more minutes playing around with the firmware were pretty much enough for me to feel very comfortable with it.
 
What are the specific settings that can go wrong if not followed and are not addressed by Fiio? Can you list them, please? Just so we don't talk in vague terms, bur rather in specifics... What are the specific problems you had(that don't include the E12)?
 
To me it seems most of the problems people have(especially after 1.22b firmware) are because of things that have nothing to do with Fiio - inability to follow simple instructions(Format your sd cards in the way specified in the manual), problems with the user's hardware - faulty or fake micro sd cards, bad USB hubs on their computers, or problem with messed up source files(tags). Also... don't forget that nobody could predict all the problems one might encounter while using the hardware. That's why we have a bugzilla page to enter and vote for bug fixes and that's why we have firmware updates. I can't fault Fiio for their work on that one - to me they are doing awesome job at keeping an open ear to their customers and they have fixed most of the problems that people encountered and have expressed desire to continue their work on making the firmware better.
 
Another set of problems people have are things that Fiio knows about and has established as features(and not bugs) and is not willing to change simply because their feedback says that this is the way the majority of their customers prefer their product to operate. In other words - if they changed it, much more people would be upset than now. There's pretty much nothing we can do about that, but to voice our opinion (both here and more importantly - on the bugzilla page) and hope that if enough people have the same desires as us this would make a difference for next releases of the firmware.
 
We get that you are disappointed about the E12 not being able to suit your needs, but you returned it and didn't lose anything by trying it. It is not Fiio's fault that you expected to get a feature from it that pretty much no other portable amp on the market has. This is the default setting - line outs don't have anything on the way. I asked you earlier to tell us if you find a pure amp that supports that functionality, and I doubt you'd find one in this price range. And I dare you to find a single amp manufacturer that doesn't support balance control and advertises(or cautions) that you lose the ability to do balance control if your signal goes through the line out. This is the rule, not the exception. It's simply not anything out of the ordinary so you'd have to warn people about it.

 

[mattheguy]

My X5 should be delivered today and while that is a case for joy and happiness, last night my HDD which holds my music on failed... D'oh!!

I was planning on re-ripping my library to FLAC anyways but it's the historic nature of that library that pains me! 10 years work in that!!

So while my X5 arrives, I can't use for a few days while I sort my HDD issues first! Hopefully not too long before I can enjoy tinkering and the quality sounds...

Mat

 

[x RELIC x]

My X5 should be delivered today and while that is a case for joy and happiness, last night my HDD which holds my music on failed... D'oh!!

I was planning on re-ripping my library to FLAC anyways but it's the historic nature of that library that pains me! 10 years work in that!!

So while my X5 arrives, I can't use for a few days while I sort my HDD issues first! Hopefully not too long before I can enjoy tinkering and the quality sounds...

Mat

Welcome to the club! Good luck with your HDD. :eek:

 

[mattheguy]

I should be able to pull music from my iPod back to laptop and revisit sites music purchased from to re-download if I don't have a cd to rip. Just delays me playing with the X5!

 

[CH23]

My X5 should be delivered today and while that is a case for joy and happiness, last night my HDD which holds my music on failed... D'oh!!

I was planning on re-ripping my library to FLAC anyways but it's the historic nature of that library that pains me! 10 years work in that!!

So while my X5 arrives, I can't use for a few days while I sort my HDD issues first! Hopefully not too long before I can enjoy tinkering and the quality sounds...

Mat

Sorry to hear this.

It's really worth having a backup copy of your music.
I don't know how many GB you had, but getting an inexpensive USB stick and making a copy is always a good idea.

 

[musicheaven]

I should be able to pull music from my iPod back to laptop and revisit sites music purchased from to re-download if I don't have a cd to rip. Just delays me playing with the X5!

There are plenty of commercial tools that rip the music out of the iPod and iTunes if you want onto a drive of your own choosing. That's what I have been using from the get go. You have to remember that pulling purchased music from the iTunes Store is another story. For your drive issue, really sorry it's a major lost. if you have some time you may want to talk about backup strategy, I have perfected the art. I own a 4 TB server fully backed up including the op system I can swap in a moment's notice. The best remedy with server/PC failure is a healthy dose of software backup and hardware redundancy. It will cost you money but will make you sleep soundly at night.

 

[Rearwing]

This is really good advice, after one really bad experience 3TB of music lovingly ripped in FLAC disappearing as my external hard drive fubarred itself, I vowed to always back up to two separate sources. This is time consuming, but it has been worth it! My advice would be to have two externals hard drives, of different manufacture as well, or at least from different batches. 
 
Having said all of this, the wait will be worth it, I bought the X5 as soon as I was able and it is as good as the best reviews and some! Yes, there is a new UI to learn. However, it is worth the wait, this machines punches well above its weight.

 

[doki81]

even though there are some little bugs with X5..but i think overall..it's forgivable and i can bear with it until new fw released. for this price point...i can say x5 is consider the best in it's class

 

[bubba-ho-tep]

I purchased the X5 to replace my dying 160GB iPod Classic.  I knew that I didn't want another Apple device so I did a great deal of research into DAPs.  The X5 met all of my basic needs, including price point, far better than anything else I read about.  The MicroSD card support and, yes, the promise of firmware upgrades was a big selling point for me.  That said, I knew based largely on pre-release reviews at Head-Fi that there were a number of potential shortcomings that needed to be addressed.  To their credit, the folks at Fiio have been very active in implementing improvements to UI and performance.  There's still some room for improvement but I'm extremely happy with my X5.
 
As far as "learning curves" go, it only took me about a day or two to feel comfortable with the UI.  Another thing that helped was that I actually read that quick-start guide that came with the player before I even turned it on.  I get the feeling from reading some of these negative posts that not everybody read the documentation.  The biggest pain for me was having to rename all of my music files so that the track number came first in the filename, but that was easily accomplished using the MP3Tag software.
 
Is the X5 perfect?  Not by a long shot.  I would still like to see the following implemented:

1. Playlist support
2. Track number tag support so that I don't have to have the track number at the beginning of all my file names
3. A "Compilations" option in the library browser
4. EQ support for files higher than 24/48 resolution (although I typically prefer to listen to all my music with no EQ tweaks applied).

 
I'm confident that at least a couple of these will be addressed by the Fiio team at some point, but I won't lose any sleep if a couple of items on that wish list are never addressed.  In spite of the limitations of the X5, I do not regret my purchase one bit.

 

[Age8E]

The assertion that you shouldn't research a major purchase like the X5 is, to me, just absurd.
 
People act as if returning a product they don't like is no big deal. But it costs a retailer or manufacturer time and money to clean, repurpose and repackage an item for resale, or especially to recycle it when resale is not feasible (which means they're essentially eating the cost of the item). That adds to the overhead of making and selling a product, and makes things more expensive for everybody.
 
Which is fine, if a return is due to a legitimate problem. But all too often, it's avoidable, if the customer simply knows what he or she is buying before they pull the trigger. And something like 9 out of 10 returns are due not to actual flaws or defects, but user error.
 
It's just irresponsible to buy something major without knowing as much as you can about it, even if you have a lot of money to waste.

 

[Wokei]

  An honest question deserves an honest answer. I still have to hear from anybody at Fiio about the many different bugs that remain. At least a timeline or an official response.
All I read is people defending the brand for the sake of it, defending the brand because they have some non-disclosed interest on it, people genuinely declaring they are fine with the state of things or complaining about many things regarding the X5. Only the two last groups add value to this thread.

If you don't want more critics or complains, why don't you ask for the thread to be closed? There really is nothing good left to be said, as it has been said already by someone, somewhere in the 640 pages. I believe Fiio can learn a lot from all the comments, complains, advices, ideas and the like.

I don't know why you could ever think that a person has to heavily research a DAP before buying it, while reading countless reviews and endless pages on a thread like this to know what they are getting into. We passed 640 pages on this thread alone and people still write about new bugs or errors or things that nobody knows how to solve. The X5 bugzilla is useless as it is old and not updated.
I'll give you the point 1 you make; fair enough, but the market don't give a damn about Fiio's shortcomings or beginner's status. The second point is a joke. Sorry, but I don't agree. Point 3 is also fair, although I don't think like you. Point 4 is again your point of view and not mine. Fiio misled all buyers of the X5 and the E12 by not warning them that they will lose the balance control if used as a combo. It's not a big misled, and I don't think for a moment that they did it on purpose, but they make me and several others return the E12 because of that.

I don't believe in "just wait for the update" as the only reasonable answer from a company's fan's (nor from the company itself, but they won't respond in time). I believe in bringing official information, in giving answers, solutions, tips, upgrade deadlines, and taking care of the domino effect you get when you just let the people deal with the problems by themselves alone. Take a look at the X5's web site and please tell me if what they say they are selling is not missing a few bits of truth regarding the firmware, that turns out to be essential for the experience. And I'm telling you this with just a few non-important bugs on my X5.

All the right things that the X5 does do not cancel out the things that are wrong. I love the X5, but I won't hide my disappointment because of that. Why all has to be binary, either right or not, choose-a-side-and-stick-there, with nothing in between?

I respect that you see the good in the X5, and I see it too, as I ordered 2 units, and enjoy one of them. And I think that the X5 is the best DAP for the money, so I don't need to accept your challenge. But different things are different things, and I prefer to keep them apart.
 
"The few" are not so few.

Simple solution for you Muenchener ...if you think X5 is not up to expectations and the shortcomings  ...the company has misled you ...you dont want to wait for update ,,,if you see no reason to research on future products to buy .... Just Return IT ....Boo hooo stop whining.
 
Get your money back ...problems solved. move on and keep doing what you insist on not researching because its year 2014 ...no guarantee you wont be misled again or even better you can come back later to report what dap you bought with similar/even higher price bracket that tick all the boxes for you. Even the best products in the world will not satisfy everyone but one need to take the good bit and live with the not so good bit. 
 
Peace out!

 

[Nicolas2305]

  Simple solution for you Muenchener ...if you think X5 is not up to expectations and the shortcomings  ...the company has misled you ...you dont want to wait for update ,,,if you see no reason to research on future products to buy .... Just Return IT ....Boo hooo stop whining.
 
Get your money back ...problems solved. move on and keep doing what you insist on not researching because its year 2014 ...no guarantee you wont be misled again or even better you can come back later to report what dap you bought with similar/even higher price bracket that tick all the boxes for you. Even the best products in the world will not satisfy everyone but one need to take the good bit and live with the not so good bit. 
 
Peace out!

 
I think that your comment was unnecessary.
 
While I don't share Muenchener's point of view and am fully happy with my X5 I feel that he wasn't whining but simply answering other people's answers. I feel he was clear that he expressed his point of view and by his standards more information was expected from FiiO.
 
I see that some users get very passionate about hardware and it's normal, it's Head-Fi after all. I just think that everyone can share its passion while staying civilized and avoiding personal attacks.