DIGITAL MP3 PLAYER FIIO PORTABLE
DIGITAL MP3 PLAYER FIIO PLUS

It’s a compact unit, just under 11cm long, 5.5cm wide and 1.6cm thick, and despite weighing only 122g it feels solid and chunky in its metal skin.

DIGITAL MP3 PLAYER FIIO PORTABLE

What was originally going to be a product built around use with an external DAC/headphone amplifier – a portable digital transport, if you like – has now appeared on the market able to drive headphones well, and also with line-out audio and electrical digital outputs. In fact, there’s been talk of the X3 for some time – for almost three years, in fact! –, the manufacturer having had some component supply problems along the way, requiring the project to be put on the back-burner for a while, and ultimately demanding a complete rethink of the specification. Based in Guagzhou, China, Fiio was founded in 2007, and its products are now distributed globally through more than 60 partners. Looks like this high-resolution on the move is going to prove expensive.Įxcept… There’s the Fiio X3 – a newly-launched pocket music player from another Chinese company with a background in portable amplifiers and the like, and selling for around £160 through its UK distributors. However, the problem is that these players tend to be pricey: the Colorfly C4, which is either cunningly retro in its looks or just plain ugly, is £549, while it’s perfectly possible to spend £1000 or more on one of the A&K players.

DIGITAL MP3 PLAYER FIIO PLUS

There’s a few of those about or on the way: the Colorfly models from China, and the Astell & Kern machines from iriver offshoot Astell & Kern, plus of course the much-vaunted – but yet to materialise – Pono player from rock star Neil Young. So what do you use to drive these new headphones? Well, you can add a headphone amp to better power the headphones, but that still doesn’t get over the iOS devices’ limitations, so clearly a change of player is required.

However, that hasn’t stopped headphone manufacturers developing ever more capable models for mobile listening, to the point where you can now spend well into four figures for a pair of little in-ear headphones, and designs costing £200 or more are increasingly commonplace.

There are two ways of looking at that limitation: one is that for mobile listening you really don’t need quality beyond CD, as you’re likely to be listening in noisy mobile environments the other suggests that the iPod has always been about cramming the maximum number of ‘songs’ into the storage space available, with little regard for sound quality beyond ‘good enough’. There’s a problem with locking yourself into what the computer commentators call ‘the Apple eco-system’: for all the advantages of the company’s ‘it just works’ interoperability between computers and mobile devices, when it comes to music beyond CD quality, iTunes and the various iOS devices are a bit of a dead loss. The highly affordable Fiio X3 digital music player is just about the perfect way to take high-resolution music – at up to 24-bit/192kHz – out and about

Digital mp3 player fiio