The FiiO X Series is a line of

portable music player A portable audio player is a personal mobile device that allows the user to listen to recorded audio while mobile. Sometimes a distinction is made between a ''portable'' player, battery-powered and with one or more small loudspeakers, and a ''per ...

s designed and manufactured by the Chinese company

FiiO Electronics Technology FiiO (FiiO Electronics Technology Company, Ltd.) is a Chinese electronics company founded in 2007 that primarily manufactures audio equipment. Its products include Portable audio player, portable music players, Audio power amplifier, audio ampli ...

Models

* All models support digital audio sampled up to 192 kHz with samples of up to 24 bits. * All models support the lossless audio formats

FLAC FLAC (; Free Lossless Audio Codec) is an audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio, developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation, and is also the name of the free software project producing the FLAC tools, the reference software ...

, ALAC,

Monkey's audio Monkey's Audio is an algorithm and file format for lossless audio data compression. Lossless data compression does not discard data during the process of encoding, unlike lossy compression methods such as Advanced Audio Coding, MP3, Vorbis ...

(APE),

WMA Lossless Windows Media Audio (WMA) is a series of audio codecs and their corresponding audio coding formats developed by Microsoft. It is a proprietary technology that forms part of the Windows Media framework. Audio encoded in WMA is stored in a digi ...

, and

WAV Waveform Audio File Format (WAVE, or WAV due to its filename extension; pronounced or ) is an audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on personal computers. The format was developed and published for the first time in 1991 ...

. * All models support the lossy audio formats

AAC AAC may refer to: Aviation * Advanced Aircraft, a company from Carlsbad, California * Airborne aircraft carrier, a type of aircraft * Alaskan Air Command, a radar network * American Aeronautical Corporation, a company from Port Washington, New ...

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

, Ogg

Vorbis Vorbis is a free and open-source software project headed by the Xiph.Org Foundation. The project produces an audio coding format and software reference encoder/decoder ( codec) for lossy audio compression, libvorbis. Vorbis is most comm ...

, and WMA. * All models support gapless playback and hardware (non DSP) bass and treble controls.

Reception

In reviewing the FiiO X3, ''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

music critic Mark Swed concluded it is a better alternative to an

iPod The iPod is a series of portable media players and multi-purpose mobile devices that were designed and marketed by Apple Inc. from 2001 to 2022. The iPod Classic#1st generation, first version was released on November 10, 2001, about mon ...

. Swed noted that the X3 utilizes that same digital-to-analog converter that is found in much more expensive players, such as Astell & Kern models that are being sold for $699 and $1,299. In his opinion the FiiO X3 may not have A&K's sweet and open sound, but it could be purchased for around $200 as of April, 2013. Steve Guttenberg of CNET compared the FiiO X5 to the

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

iPod Classic The iPod Classic (stylized and marketed as iPod classic and originally simply iPod) is a discontinued portable media player created and formerly marketed by Apple Inc. There were six generations of the iPod Classic, as well as a spin-off (the ...

and the not-yet-released PonoPlayer. He found the "iPod sounded vague and blurry next to the pristine X5" when playing identical ALAC audio files. The review also noted that the PonoPlayer plays fewer formats than the FiiO X series players, but costs more than the X3. A review of the X3 in ''Hi-Fi World'' reported that the sound and amplification are good, but added that the interface was "least intuitive" and "inelegant." The conclusion was: "a fine budget starting point in high-resolution digital."

X1

The X1 features physical buttons and a spin wheel which "clicks" when rotated. Each "click" of the wheel moves the selected item up or down. There are three buttons on the side of the device, one is used to power up/down the device and put it in sleep mode, while the other two raised buttons function for volume. In addition, when in sleep mode and playing music, the volume up/down buttons can be used for skipping a song or going back a song in the selected album/playlist.

References

{{reflist Digital audio players