![]() Bass is cleaner, with basslines easier to follow. However even on CD lossless rips the Fiio players are clearly more capable, giving a cleaner, higher-resolution, and better balanced sound on simple material, and maintaining more composure in complex material. The iPhone sounds warm and has a midrange emphasis that can make female vocals in simple arrangements sound quite pleasant. It’s not awful by any means, but clearly audio quality wasn’t the number one design criterion. Let’s be pragmatic from the outset: the iPhone sounds OK. I also tried my daughter’s Sony ZX610AP headphones – these sounded OK but were clearly balanced on the bassy / fun side and weren’t really the sort of headphones you’d pair with an fairly expensive player like the X5. In the course of this review I listened to all three players using BeyerDynamic DTX100 IEMs – decent quality earphones (costing around £80). – 24/192 flac download from Linn Records.Īll For You, A Dedication To The Nat King Cole Trio Sarasate, Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D Op 35 Wiener Philharmoniker, Herbert von Karajan The Fiio X5 thread on head-fi was 950 pages long last time I checked and there is quite a lot of discussion of this issue. I had this problem initially and this fixed it. If you format it using your PC you are likely to experience stuttering when playing back high-res FLAC files. X5 Note: it is critical that you format the SD card using the formatting option of the X5. The X3 comes with 8GB of internal storage, and the X5 with none.įor this comparison, I used a PNY 32GB class 10 SDHC card. The casework of the X5 on the other hand feels very pleasantly solid and well finished, with only the large size and flimsy scroll wheel attracting demerits. The X3 is fairly well put together but doesn’t have premium build quality. The X3 and X5 both look good value for money, with 24/192 capability, reputedly good headphone amplifiers, and USB DAC functionality, all for around £160 and £300 respectively. If you’re considering buying one of these players, there are plenty of great reviews out there. In this review I’m comparing the iPhone 4S with the Fiio X3 and X5. It is pleasing that there are enough people interested in high-quality sound to support this burgeoning market, and if it can attract people young enough to have grown up on a diet of MP3s & iTunes there’s hope for our hobby yet. This is an interesting trend for those of us who have been around long enough to remember this kind of thing: If you read HiFi magazines at all regularly you’ll have noticed that high-res digital music players have been getting quite a lot of press recently. ![]()
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