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

It's an easier format to support than either exFAT or NTFS.

Additionally, exFAT is still patent-encumbered.

Since I've seen no benefit from, and at least one drawback to, using FAT32 here I'm switching the cards I have in the X5iii back to exFAT.

 

OS X/macOS/Linux users may get a drop of this silly tool before the Windows crowd does as it is fundamentally done for those platforms.

As ever, despite decades of experience building complicated, cross-platform, software ... the minute Windows is involved, even for simple things, that invariably becomes "across all other platforms + special-case nonsense for Windows".

And even that special-case stuff doesn't make any bleedin' sense ... it's right up there with a reality that includes forty-three species of parrots, nipples for men, and slugs. We are clearly in the hands of a complete lunatic here.

To further this silliness, once we're down the "it'll be a call into the kernel" route, the volume information I need here is not exposed via GetVolumeInformation(), or some other moderately sane function, but instead it's a roundabout path via GetDiskFreeSpace().

Bastards.

 

To be fair, we're in a world where a reality TV star is now president. Potentially W10 users that are more daring can use the tool with the bash on Windows.

 

They could, and I suppose they can if they'd like, but they won't need to. I made the necessary additions during a particularly dull meeting.

It just never ceases to amaze me just how backwards Windows is internally and in terms of any kind of actual adherence to/compliance with reasonable standards*. Even working in Windows Core, albeit many years ago now, it was always a surprise as to just how fucked up things got. You'd go in expected something daft ... and it'd always be worse than you had imagined.

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*Little gems like not supporting UAC2 out of the box for 16 years after it came to be and, bizarrely, only finally adding support just as UAC3 gets ratified.

 

I have my own OS X/Linux Python library>DAP microSD cards selector tool, but it's way too weirdly specialized to my own twisted library configuration to be generally usable. I'd be interested in seeing yours when it's ready to download and see if anything in mine needs to be added. Don't want to clutter this thread with tool comments, will follow until you fork a tool thread, if you do. Thanks!

 

In this case, the "first" tool I'm doing for this is just a little command-line job that'll purge the crud files from a library with an option to preserve them elsewhere. It'll report on what it finds as well, so you can decide if "my" definition of crud matches yours. But it's not very involved feature-wise.

After that I'll do a proper UI-equipped DAP "library management" application, but that'll be a full-blown piece of software with sync, auto-populate, and so on and will almost certainly be macOS only.

 

Back to the X5iii for a bit ... ahead of updating the main post and talking properly about how it sounds and so on.

If I had decided to catalog all the little issues I've come across in the software on the X5iii, doing one per post, this might be the 2nd longest thread on the entire site. My god there are a lot of silly little things. And a lot of them occur once and then I can't make them re-occur (or figure out what caused it in the first place) - and yes, infrequent/sporadic bugs of that nature can be a real pisser to find (even though once found the fixes are often trivial).

One such issue cropped up last night while just listening and not actually fiddling around with anything. I'd let the screen timeout out while listening, picked up the player to switch albums, and the Android navigation bar was displayed on the lock screen. Neither the virtual navigation buttons NOR the unlock operations were responsive ... which required the player to be powered off in order to do anything else with it.

If you're the kind of person that interacts with your DAP heavily, rather than just setting it playing and leaving it alone, you might want to give it a couple more firmware releases before you jump in.

Switching my card format back to exFAT does seem to have remedied the issue of album art not showing up for several minutes after a reboot. I have no idea if the format switch was the actual cause of this problem, but it first showed up on switching to FAT32 and has not been observed since reverting to exFAT, so it probably is the case.

Yanking the pre-installed glass screen protector made a significant difference to the responsiveness of the touch-screen. Not sure I'd recommend doing this for most people, especially as you'll have a bugger of a time getting it back on cleanly, but since I'm not going to run this as a general purpose Android device (I'll never play videos on it, browse with it, play games on it or use it for anything other than playing music) I don't care if the screen gets scratches on it.

The "Viper Effect" stuff seems to me to be gimmicky nonsense and most of the effects are in-app paid downloads anyway.

There's a fair amount of chatter, currently, about people wanting to get "more bass/slam" out of the thing. I'm not really sure what that's about. Maybe bass-heads with poorly matched OI to IEMs (or maybe just using shitty IEMs). Being a 4490 "Velvet Sound" design, it doesn't really need a lot of help in terms of bass quantity or apparent slam. Bass quality, maybe, depending on your choice of filter, since the typical 4490 bloom is there in some modes.

Still like the player, so don't get the wrong idea. If I knew then, what I know now, I'd still buy it. It'd still just get used for when I want to carry more of my library and/or have access to a better streaming option than via my phone. And it still ranks behind the WM1A in most respects.

 

Thanks. The full app sounds cool, macOS works for me Currently I keep text files listing the albums I want in each of my microSD. I wrote a small Python program that reads of of those files, looks for the corresponding album folders in my library, which a a complicated structure, and creates a folder of symlinks to the album folders. I then use a sync/backup program (ChronoSync) to sync the SD card to the folders linked to from the symlink folder. Yes, pretty convoluted, but I had ChronoSync around already. I hadn't thought of the crud files that might have got into the album folders, though, your crudbuster is a good idea on its own.

 

I'm not sure how much of a problem those "crud" files (the tool currently calls them "GUTBs" ... for reasons that aren't likely to become apparent in the short term) really are for others, but there was about 10GB (once you factored in "space on disk" or "slack space" due to large cluster sizes) of them in my ~500GB "travel" library.

Love this tool. Not 100% intuitive at first, but once you have it's peculiarities figured out it's fantastic. I use it to keep my music and video libraries in proper sync across several storage systems (a couple of big arrays, my music server, etc.).

Smart way to go.

Internally my "full" app will do something similar, though it'll use rules, as well as specific designations, to control what goes where.

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Oddly, the biggest benefit I've gotten from this little bit of code so far was confirmation of the actual number of MUSIC files I had in my travel library. This was causing issues with understanding/verifying if music indexing was working properly on the X5iii. There were enough "crud" files in the library to seriously throw off the OS raw file count in comparison to the DAPs count of actual MUSIC files.

 

I had assumed you were using "velvet sound" as a euphemism for "overly smooth and lacking detail". I finally read the post in @Psalmanazar's you linked to above and googled it and realized it's actually the name of the design. Psalm's descriptors can sometimes be, how shall I put it, extreme, so can you describe it's qualities in more pedestrian language? For comparison, I heard a Bifrost briefly (don't know which flavour) which I thought gave me a taste of Moffat Bass, and my daily drive is the micro iDSD (silver). Thanks!

 

Got the chance to compare Sony NW-WM1A with Fiio X5iii today at my local store. Beware of the noob

Background story:

I just got the Sony recently and it's huge and heavy. Since I was originally interested in the Fiio X5iii and own a X3ii, the X5iii seems to be a good compromise between the two in terms of size, weight and soundquality. The plan was to check out the X5iii, like it, buy it, and return the Sony.

Earphones used: CA Andromeda stock cable and foam tips.


Noob Comparison

Unfortunately, the Fiio didn't convince me today.

• Fiio music player app was not intuitive enough and too cluttered with stuff I don't need. I used the android app "Poweramp" once which was great in terms of usability. Not so here.
• UI is better on the Sony in terms of aesthetics, speed and usability
• hiss with the Andromedas was too much for me and bothered me on the Fiio
• cymbals were to dominant for me in comparison to the Sony*
  • they were not yet strident, but the cymbals caught my attention the whole time and I wondered: why!?
• bass was not a problem for me on the X5iii

Both units had the newest firmware (Sony 1.20 and Fiio 1.1.4). The Fiio had almost no burn in time (maybe that's the reason for the way the highs sounded?). Music listened to was prog rock, metal, vocal stuff,


Conclusion

The disadvantages of the Fiio (UI, hiss and soundquality) outweigh the advantages over the Sony for me (size and weight). I might give the X5iii another chance if I learn of misconceptions or errors in reasoning on my side. The upcoming X7ii might be interesting, too. The funny side of the story: I didn't even know the Sony existed until I read this thread because of the Fiio X5iii.


* Since I don't have a trained hearing I am hesitant to write that the highs were harsh or strident, or that the Sony sounded analog and natural in comparison. I would describe it like that, but I have no idea if I use the terms correctly and I guess one can't call gear "natural" if one barely listens to acoustic music. Still, voices and cymbals might be a point of reverence.

 

It's not just the name of the specific design but part of AKM's "sound philosophy". It is something they've given an interview about, which includes how they've worked with various manufacturers to come up with the specific tuning. And they are applying it across multiple versions of their DAC chips, with it being a prominently called out feature for the 449X series. Fortunately it does not seem to affect the raw D to A converter and the tuning for it is handled pre/post processing (filters etc.), which can be bypassed by anyone willing to do the work.

As to how it sounds ... well ... it depends somewhat on which specific filter you run it with. Some designs allow this to be selected, which is true of the X5iii but not, say, of the Bifrost, but there are some general traits that seem common regardless of how it is setup. The most prominent is a tendency for bass-bloom which can be significant enough to intrude on the lower mids ... an effect that will be amplified if your transducers are already a bit bass-happy or tuned on the warm side of things. You do, or I do at least, get the sense of more slam as part of this. And then, being very much more filter dependent, the upper registers can be rendered anywhere from pretty smoothly to a bit sizzly and, perhaps, even a tad harsh.

But, at it's best, it tends to be a bit bass-emphasized, warm, with some bloom a generally lucid midrange and highs that range from quite smooth to a bit nasty. I don't find it lack in detail though ... at least from the mids on up ... the bass bloom can make a mess of bass articulation.

Still ... personally, I find @Psalmanazar's descriptions capture how I actually feel about it (when the "velvet sound" signature it is fully in evidence) rather well!

 

The bloom varies a good amount:
The Bifrost 4490 is more offensive than the Modi 2U 4490 which is warmer than the Grace M9XX (which has its own custom filters), which still has a hint of bloom and softness as Grace voiced it around the stock HD 800. I'm guessing the warm Bifrost Uber analog stage isn't mixing that well with whatever stock filter Schiit chose (linear phase, slow rolloff?).

Unlike ESS Sabre chips monotone bass and horrific treble timbre, it seems to be fully possible to work around the AK4490 onward "Velvet Sound" chips to get better sound. The 4490 chips are a big step up technically from the prior generation of AK chips (4396 and 4399) which were a big step up from the older ones.

AK seems to have added Wolfson level dynamics and Cirrus staging to their chips while massively improving the treble timbre. I am wondering what someone aiming for neutrality instead of a v shaped, bloom, or oversaturation can achieve which is why I want to hear the RME ADI-2 Pro which is dual mono AK4490 with selectable filters and multiple chips for higher accuracy and SNR.

 

For anyone that doesn't need the extra storage or streaming capability of the X5iii, and that can afford the Sony, I would expect most people to pick the WM1A as their preference both sonically and operationally.

I can't comment on the hiss with the Andromeda specifically, though it's clear the X5iii exhibits more hiss than the Sony regardless - enough that the output section gets turned off when it's not been used for a moment or two (a change you can clearly hear).

Did you play with the different filter options on the X5iii? (I'm not talking about the "Viper Effect" stuff, but rather the ability to select between the five different filters that are built into the DAC itself.) While I don't think any of them put the X5iii ahead of the Sony units, they do alter the signature of the unit significantly enough to be easily discernible and, if you like that sort of thing, somewhat tunable.

Overall all though, the Sony is just a much more polished device. If you'd tried it with the firmware pre-dating 1.10 you'd have had a different user experience, as it was rather laggy, but since 1.10 it's been very nice. The UX responsiveness of the X5iii is significantly hampered by the pre-installed screen protector.

Of the two, if I could only have one, it'd definitely be the Sony unit even though it's as much as three times the price of the FiiO.

 

That is really interesting since I hear little to no hiss using the same earphones. Are you usually sensitive to hiss?

I do agree that the Fiio music app needs work however I use poweramp for everything instead. I had already purchased it on my phone so just updated to the paid version. I probably wouldn't be too happy if I had to use the Fiio music app without any alternatives.

 

Out of curiosity, does "Poweramp" see both of the card slots on the X5iii?

Also, is it accurate that the thing needs an internet connection to verify it's license on the paid version?

 

Having just read @Hrodulf's review of this, it is very likely to move up in priority as part of my DAC comparisons. While I've almost finished shutting down one of my homes, my "studio" is in the other one, and I haven't started on that yet. I have much less space in the new place, so lots of gear is going to have to be consolidated (or I'm going to wind up having to rent a space and put the music and photography "studio" stuff there), and this looks like a reasonable contender to fulfill multiple duties.

If I can pull it off in one location, then I'd also use this for starting to do measurements of this stuff - the plan to date there was to use my normal scopes or just grab a little Focusrite 2i2 for those tasks.

I'll try and line up the pro-type gear (the RME, Dangerous Music, Burl, Crane Song, Lynx Hilo) together when I do get to it.

 

I only have one micro sd card at the moment so no idea if it sees both or not. You usually don't need an Internet connection however every once in a while you will need to verify again which you would need Internet to do. This happens on my phone as well (maybe 2 or 3 times on my phone in 2+ years) and you won't be able to play music until you verify again. I don't see that as a huge deal since I can just tether with my phone.

 

If you swap the card to the 2nd slot, that'll answer whether it sees it or not (since the 2nd slot isn't registered as an "external storage folder", any player that enumerates that list to discover storage can't see it ... regardless of it there is anything in the first slot or not).

My experience with those sort of license checks is that they invariably pop-up when I'm half way across the ocean with no usable internet connection, so that disqualifies "Poweramp" as a possible alternative to FiiO music for me.

Thanks!

 

Sweet thanks! Also the Steinberg U22 mkII is better than the Focusrite 2i2. Had the ability to be fed by a wall wart, much better drivers and more knobs at the cost of a worse Cirrus AD/DA codec chip (CS4270 vs the CS4272 in the Focusrite.) Not that you'll need these cheap crap interfaces with a Lynx or RME product.

Super interested in the Lynx vs RME as they write their own drivers and the Schiit C-Media USB drivers barely work for me for laptop use (Modi DS and all Bifrosts work on Windows 10 but nothing else. Haven't tried Yggdrasil or Gungnir DS off my laptop yet.) But the lower-fidelity Steinberg cheapie stuff works as Yamaha and Cubase. Too bad Schiit and RME won't go full Thunderbolt or make a Thunderbolt to AES/SPDIF box.