FiiO X5 3rd Gen (FiiO X5iii): Stream of Consciousness Impressions & Review

@Torq. Did you manage to try this with some easy to drive full-sized headphones yet? Seems like this would be a solid replacement for the Mojo if it does have enough balls, as per your impressions?
Here is to hoping for the best.

 

About half way down this post, I have a couple of brief comments:

Using the SE output, driving full-sized headphones works quite nicely. With the Utopia the results are very enjoyable even in LOW GAIN mode and it does a believable job pushing the HD800S. Switch to HIGH GAIN and things get a lot more convincing. Where as in low gain the Sennheisers aren't driven with as much authority as I'd like, I'd have to be very nit-picky to say the same in high-gain mode. No doubt the maximum available voltage swing of 8vp-p isn't hurting here.

Despite being less powerful, I feel the X5iii does a better job natively driving the HD800S than the Mojo did.
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I haven't done more extensive listening with full-size cans yet as I've been procrastinating pre-occupied with other things ... maybe this evening as a respite from the S19 stuff.

 

I have tested so far 3 combinations of connections for my ΗΕ-500's and my HD800's.

One on high gain single ended: Sound fine no problems with prat or transients to get good levels they run about from 75-95 out of the 120 potentiometer steps so not bad.

Second is balanced thru the AK type (2,5trs) balanced connector (i made myself two balanced cables for both my phones) and they sound slightly better in the areas of separation and spatial definition but not very much but volume has to be slightly raised to maximum about 100-110 for low recordings since it seems balanced output is slightly less than the unbalanced.

Thirdly on single ended low gain i felt that the phone where not performing at the best although listenable.

In comparison to the internal amplifier, the addition of Fiio A5 amplifier gives definitely authority and better dynamics not influencing the sound too much.

I cannot say which i like best yet. The balanced wins me over ever so slightly because of the extra spatial definition but this is very slight.

 

Has the coax issue on this player been remedied? I'm looking for a DAP that can also pull double duty as a digital transport for my Modi Multibit.

 

If you're referring to it being limited to 24/96 output, no, not so far.

 

All my music is going to be digitized from CD's so I guess that doesn't affect me. If you just had 16/44 files, would the Fiio X5 be a good coax transport in your opinion? I'm curious to see how the SQ compares to a CD player via coax.

 

It would depend, a great deal, on what CD transport you are using.

In most cases, absent it being something either exotic and/or very recent, you'll likely be making a trade-off against the almost-certainly better clock performance of pretty much any reasonably serious modern DAP vs. the likely lower electrical noise of a competently engineered CD transport. Generally, your bigger concern here will be with jitter, i.e. clock performance, as Modi Multibit doesn't (I don't believe) re-clock it's S/PDIF inputs and jitter is generally more directly audible than electrical noise on a digital input (USB has much higher levels of issue here, which is why it's more of a factor with USB than with typical COAX connections).

Honestly though, I doubt the difference would be noticeable at this level.

 

Bear with me ... so the jitter performance (clock quality) should theoretically be better on a DAP like the Fiio vs a CD transport. Got it. I'm using a Tascam CD200, not exactly a modern or exotic transport. I guess the DAPs also don't have to carry out error correction like a CD player so that would be another benefit in favor of the DAP.

Other than the issue with playing DoP and 24/192, would you say the coax out on the Fiio X5 is of high quality? Do you think there are any other DAPs that would be better suited for this application? Again, I do most of my listening at home. Strangely enough, the Fiio would be used 70% of the time as a desktop transport but I like the flexibility of taking it on the road when I want to.

 

It still depends on the CD transport. Cheap, modern, ones will almost certainly be outperformed by most DAPs, clock wise. Genuine "audiophile" transports and players, especially from the "golden age" of such things, will be much closer clock-wise, with some units being even better.

The CD-200 uses a cheap, modern, transport mechanism but offsets this by using a disc-to-buffer, buffer-to-output architecture. So the disc is read, any ECC performed, and a memory buffer is populated. The digital outputs (external or the internal bus) are then fed by clocking data out of that memory buffer. This is much more accurate then relying on track-servo synchronization, but is still dependent on the quality of the clocks reading from that buffer.

Very high-quality players, even older ones, are mass-damped, with custom transports that keep the rotational speed of the disc as stable as possible, so there's less internal stuff going on and THEN they use buffers and high-quality internal clocks to drive their outputs.

I'm quite confident the X5iii will exhibit less jitter than the CD-200.

Electrical noise ... well, the CD-200 should do better there.

No way to know which will sound better, for sure, without trying, but my money would be on the X5iii.

It works fine ... I don't see any particular issues with it, hardware wise. There's not a lot to improve on, beyond having it electrically isolated - and I don't know of any DAPs that do that. It's more than good enough for the task at hand and I doubt any of the pricier models will yield better results.

I also doubt the differences will be audible. Measurable, sure, but I am not convinced the differences will be something you can hear.

 

Would this be a good match with the Audioquest Nighthawk/Nightowl? No one where near me sells both items to try...

 

No word, in coming up a month now, on the timing/content of the next firmware release.

Given that there are incomplete/unavailable features, still lots of niggles/stupid shit, and what I'm perceiving as a lower rate/level of participation from FiiO in the threads around this player, make sure you check that the features you want are actually currently available and working before you buy!

Things like not supporting COAX output at more than 24/96, the odd way in which external storage is exposed and so on are still issues and there's no specific word on if those will be fixed and, if so, when. Not huge issues if you're going to just it as a player, but if you're looking for a transport, or want to use third-party music player applications (other than streaming clients), there are a still a number of challenges here.

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Also, I had my hands on the iBasso DX200 for a little bit over the weekend. Didn't enjoy that at all ... completely sterile presentation. You could argue that's a good thing, in that it is neutral and seems to be aimed at being more of a "reference" delivery. Unfortunately it was completely boring to listen to and seemed to strip the music of life and involvement. The firmware there is in worse shape than the FiiO unit's also - which seems to be an iBasso trademark.

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X5iii w/ AAW W900 was very entertaining - still prefer the WM1A over the X5iii. The X5iii signature is definitely more colored there. Though more time with the FiiO, in relaxing listening sessions, has me re-thinking whether I want to go for a WM1Z (for both the extra capacity and for the slightly more romantic tuning).

 

I hope Fiio gets the X5 III sorted when it comes to use as a digital transport. Have you ever tried the X5 II as a coax transport? I wonder if its just as good for that application as the III and the firmware is probably more solid to boot.

 

At this point I'm actually sort of curious what you'd think of a ZX2 with SoundEnhancement off, considering that to me, it's more neutral than the WM1A.

 

Never heard the Nighthawk/Nightowl so I will have to defer to someone else on that.

No, sorry. the X5II has (or had, at least) limits on library size that rendered it useless as a transport for me, so I never bothered to test it further and just stuck with the AK120 I was using in that role at the time.

If I ever come across one, and am in the mood, I'll give it a listen. Absent a spectacular deal on one, however, it's unlikely that I'll be acquiring my own at this point.

 

Does the X5iii have any issues with gapless playback? I don't recall that coming up in this thread.

 

Yes, it does.

I haven't actually retested this with firmware 1.1.4, and I don't have the firmware revision noted where I did try it and found that it, essentially, didn't work at all.

It's probably worth re-iterating that I'm not attempting to note, nor track, all the issues I've found with it. There are lots of little ones, and some major ones - how any given issue is classified is going to vary by user however, and that one is not a big issue for me as for portable streaming use (which is how I'll use the X5iii >95% of the time) it's rare that I'm listening to albums as a whole.

 

After retesting with firmware 1.1.4 (the current version) last night it seems that gapless playback is working correctly.

I did find another issue though, and that is that with any output other than the headphone outputs, if gapless playback isn't enabled then you sometimes get clicks between tracks and occasionally it'll skip the first second of the song. These issues are supposedly resolved in the beta for the next firmware update*.

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*I've learned not to get involved with firmware betas for DAPs ... especially those of either Android or Chinese** persuasion. The "release" firmware versions are often enough of a horror-show on their own that adding any more drama with additional beta-issues has never proved to be worth it. Though, to be fair, while there are lots of niggly, silly, bugs on the X5iii it's much better shape than a lot of other units I've used and, for most purposes, is in the "usable" category here.

**Typically decent hardware with half-assed software/firmware ... and by no means limited to DAP-type products.

 

Piddling around with some tool updates today:

First, I'm adding an option to "normalize" folder-level album art if it is present and you elect to keep it. So you can get everything to be "folder.jpg" or "cover.jpg", regardless of what it is currently called (I found mine were mixed, depending on where the albums had come from). It'll either remove the files that aren't of the naming convention you want to keep or rename one of the files that is present to your preferred convention.

Next is a toggle that'll let you change the library so that all album-art is handled at the folder level (removing it from individual files after extracting a single, folder-level, copy) or is embedded in the individual files. If switching from folder-level to file-level embedded art, that'll have a priority switch so that you can either have folder-level files override and replace embedded art, or preserve existing embedded art.

Finally, for this pass, an option to convert all album art, embedded or otherwise, to a common format ... specifically baseline (non-progressive) .JPG. Some players (e.g. the Sony WM1X series) don't like progessive .JPG files, so this is a single-command way of getting existing art converted (where needed, it won't touch files that are already in the right format) to something supported by your player.

Hopefully when those are done I'll have a better packaging solution as well that doesn't require Python 3.6.1

And that'll probably the last of the updates to the command line version of the tool.

 

Well it's more like Torq's Media Library Crud Purger given the acronym.