Review, Tested: FiiO X1 Portable High Resolution Music Player

I would bet that the latest posts about the Sandisk 128Gb microSDXC card might have got some people thinking – who on Earth would need a 128Gb card, at such a price premium?

Well, as it turns out, I decided to gift myself some early Christmas presents, and one of them is FiiO’s X1 Portable High Resolution Music Player. FiiO sprung to prominence as a Chinese audio accessories manufacturer for “audiophiles on a budget” when they released many low-cost small headphone amplifiers, such as the E5. FiiO cemented a reputation of being good value for money, if you were willing to live with some imperfections.

The X1 is their latest effort, released late this year, at making an affordable high quality portable music player. Priced at about AU$129, and of a similar size to the iPod, the unit comes with no on-board storage instead relying on MicroSDXC cards up to 128Gb. The unit boasts support for most lossy (MP2, MP3, OGG, AAC/M4A), as well as lossless formats (APE, FLAC, ALAC, WMA, WAV) up to 192khz/24bit with >=110dB SNR and a claimed power of 100mW into 16 ohms, 65mW into 32 ohms and 8mW into 300 ohms. The integrated battery life, however, is a less than spectacular 11-hours.

These are pretty impressive specs for a unit in such a price range, and my Toshiba Gigabeat X30 was well due for retirement with numerous hard disk issues and shortened battery life. As a result, I decided to pony up the cash and see just what all the fuss was about.

Unboxing

The player comes in a square box, roughly the footprint of a CD jewel case. The front colour design is reminiscent of a record, with an image of the player in the center. The player is available in two colours – silver and gold.

The rear of the box states the specifications and regulatory messages.

A common issue with popular low-cost Chinese products is that of counterfeiting. As a result, a scratch-off authenticity verification label is stuck on the top. Scratching it off reveals a code which you can use to check if your unit is genuine.

Opening the top flap and sliding out the inner tray reveals a piece of protective cardboard covering the goodies inside.

Lifting the protective cardboard cover …

… we find the packaging very neatly broken up into two segments. The player itself is inside a milky-translucent plastic bag for some added protection.

The player itself just so happens to be in a supplied black silicone “skin”. It’s nice to see that even in such a high value bundle, there are added useful accessories, which are also used to ensure the safety of the product in shipping. The skin, however, does show some imperfections and seams.

Pulling the screen hole around the top of the player allows the whole player to slide out.

The player itself has a screen protector already pre-fitted. They did a good job of it, with it pretty much dead straight and no bubbles or dust underneath. The final protective mask is still attached and should be removed before use. Just holding the player in your hand, it feels rather nice with its full aluminium body. It’s not weighty, but it doesn’t feel flimsy. The physical click wheel is covered with a rubbery coating and physically turns with detents (similar to a rotary encoder used in scroll wheels). As this is not touch sensitive, there are four buttons that flank the sides of the wheel for additional navigation purposes in addition to the central selection button. Just underneath the click wheel is a small cut-out for a multi coloured LED which indicates the operation (red for charging, green for charged, blue for on/operating).

The rear of the player features grey text which notes the brand, model number and regulatory approvals.

Along the top edge, a gold plated 3.5mm TRRS jack is supplied for audio output. It is also compatible with Apple-system remote controls, and has jack sensing to stop playback upon removal of headphones. The left edge features a power button at the top, which is recessed to prevent accidental activation, a reset button, and volume up and down buttons (which also serve next track/previous track respectively when held down).

The right side of the player has a slot for a MicroSDXC card, and the bottom has a single microUSB port for charging and data transfer.

Compared to my 30Gb hard-drive based Toshiba Gigabeat X30, the physical size and thickness is almost identical despite not having a hard drive. The playtime is also virtually identical despite the FiiO having a battery twice the size and no hard drive. This points to potential firmware and hardware optimizations that might be lacking in the FiiO. The screen on the FiiO isn’t particularly exciting either, being a 2″ 320×240 pixel screen.

Inside the big box next to the player, you get a single microUSB cable of unknown thickness, but it’s claimed to be specially designed to carry the current (it feels stiff, which is good).

Underneath all of this, there’s still more!

Interestingly, there are two more screen protectors (they promised just one more), and three different self-adhesive contact-style skins. The design probably doesn’t suit everyone, but it’s still a thoughtful gesture. A thin quick start guide and authenticity check guide is also included.

Not included are any chargers (use one you already have, or use a computer’s USB port for slightly slower charging), or any “low quality” earbuds. I think that’s a good compromise for the price, as the target market is likely to care very much about what they pair it up with.

Authenticity Check

The authenticity check can be done by scratching off the coating of the label to expose a numeric string and visiting http://www.fiio.com.cn. Once you select your language (English, in my case), you will be greeted with this page. You will need to click into the “search box” which is actually the genuine check code lookup box to begin the process.

Once you click on it, a popover should appear where you can enter the code, without spaces, and submit it.

Clicking on the check button will reveal the check result. If you get a smiley face, you’re all good. If your code is not genuine, or has been looked up numerous times even though it’s the first time you’re looking it up, then you are likely looking at a counterfeit product.

What’s Inside?

Unfortunately, this review will have no teardowns. I have been thwarted by the tiny pentalobe screws, as well as my desire not to break this unit – so we’ll have to take the manufacturer’s word for the components inside. Instead, I’ll take the opportunity to directly link the datasheets and outline pertinent details for each component.

• PCM5142 Texas Instruments/Burr Brown 2VRMS DirectPath 112dB Audio Stereo DAC with 32-bit, 384khz PCM Interface
• ISL28291 Intersil Dual Single Supply Ultra-Low Noise, Low Distortion Rail-to-Rail Output Op Amp (61Mhz -3dB bandwidth, 100dB typical CMRR, 0.00018% typical THD+N at 1khz, 2Vp-p, 1.7nV/sqrtHz at 1Khz, 630uV maximum offset voltage, 3uA input bias current)
• OPA2322 Texas Instruments 20Mhz Low-Noise 1.8V Rail-to-Rail Input/Ouput CMOS Op Amp with Shutdown (0.0005% THD+N, 8.5nV/sqrtHz at 1Khz, 10V/uS slew rate, 2mV maximum offset voltage)
• JZ4760BS Ingenics SoC (600Mhz Xburst/MIPS32 rev1 + SIMD2 Single Core CPU with VPU/GPU Vivante GC200)

It seems that it’s a very good choice of DAC and relatively good opamps. Provided the design is well done, the quality of the output should be very good. The main SoC in charge of all the operations appears to be a very generic MIPS processor, and isn’t one which I commonly see. Interestingly, the SoC seems to be capable of basic video processing but the player itself doesn’t offer any video abilities – likely to stay “core” to the philosophy of doing one thing well.

User Experience

The first thing I did was to try and get a (genuine) card in there and get some music action going. Part of this, of course, includes loading up some music. This was where the first main criticism of the FiiO could be levelled.

According to the regular benchmarks, the Sandisk 128Gb microSDXC card was only being accessed at a fraction of the 45/15Mb/s that it is capable of. The speeds reflected by the unit were reminiscent of a very old USB 2.0 card reader.

Luckily, as the media is removable, you can load files onto the card at your liberty using any reader you have at your disposal. There is a caveat with this, however. The player itself doesn’t support exFAT filesystem for SDXC cards, and is therefore technically not SDXC compatible! However, it can access SDXC cards if they are first formatted to FAT32 (a violation of the SDXC specification, but a technique often used with SDHC devices to run SDXC cards in them). This can be achieved through the menu of the FiiO X1.

The user interface itself was fairly intuitive and self-explanatory, making use of icons in many places to perform actions. I had changed the skin to a green coloured one, as it was my favourite colour, but I was a little disappointed that the background picture could not be customized.

Pressing and holding the power button brings up a white animated FiiO X1 screen as it takes 10-15 seconds to complete its bootup procedure.

The main menu screen is as follows. The UI features a top toolbar which tells you the current volume, output type (headphone/line-out which is shared), the text tooltip for the current selection, card and battery status. From here you can select now playing to see the current music playing, navigate your music via the database, or navigate via folder structure, and set playback options and system options.

In many of the menus, selections can be made by wheeling the click-wheel around and pressing the center button. Sometimes, as it’s a physical click-wheel, the wheel can be stopped mid-click and then make its final click as you press the center button causing inadvertent selections. Otherwise, the track-next and track-previous buttons can be used to toggle through selections or change the resultant setting (and sometimes this is the only way for certain settings).

Looking through a list of all the music in the database is accomplished easily, with the font of a fixed size. Asian script characters display properly, which is nice. Long titles are truncated unless currently selected, in which case it slowly “scrolls” around. Unfortunately, there is a database limit of 5800 songs at the present moment, which I have verified affects my X1. This means that when you catalogue a microSD card with more than 5800 songs, only the first 5800 songs are available in the list of all songs, by genre, by artist, by album. This can be a problem for users with large cards, or with compressed music collections (I like to travel with 256kbit/s AAC-LC files).

There is a workaround for this, which is to use the file-structure navigation which is not limited by the size of the database. Unfortunately, this doesn’t give you the full benefits of exploring by the tag data. It would be nice if the database limit was removed, or the database itself was stored on the card itself.

Scrolling through a list of 5800 songs isn’t easy however. Loading the list of 5800 songs took five seconds, which is a little on the slow side. Unlike the Gigabeat which I used a lot, there is a limit to the scroll rate and there is no “acceleration”. You can easily wear out the physical clickwheel just navigating down the list. It would be nice if they could use the track-next and track-previous as page-skip or “letter” skip features for faster navigation. Unfortunately, there is no search option either. Damn.

While a song is playing, this sort of display is shown. If the file has embedded album art or an appropriate .jpg image file is provided, then the screen is filled with the album image (seems to be cropped top and bottom). Otherwise, a generic “musical” themed background is displayed with text on top. No alternative layouts, or visualizations are offered by the player. After a certain amount of time, it idles to screen-off to save energy, with the audio continuing to play in the background and the blue LED reminding you that it is still active. Alternatively, you can invoke this locked state by short-pressing on the power button. To unlock, a short press on the power button wakes it up. During the locked state, the keys available can be configured, but by default, only the volume up and down buttons are unlocked. Short pressing on them will increase and decrease the volume respectively, but they serve a double-feature of track next and track previous on press-and-hold.

You can fast-forward in a song by holding the track-next or track-previous button and the play icon will scroll along the timeline accordingly. The seek rate seems to be a function of the file – files longer than 10 minutes seek faster but less precisely. Regardless, it’s not particularly easy to seek to a particular position and requires some level of patience.

Regardless, some thought has been placed into the interface, as during playback you can press the top left key to invoke the “shortcut” menu. This allows you to select options such as marking a track as a favourite, adding it to a playlist (new or existing), and changing the playback mode between shuffle, linear, repeat, repeat-one, and finally, deleting the file altogether (great for culling the music collection). I do really like having the delete and playlist options so quickly accessible, as it makes it ideal for vetting your music. However, there are caveats with this as well. The music database, along with created playlists are stored internally in the X1 and are not exported to the microSD card. This means that if you change cards, you will suddenly find your favourites still listed but all of them will error out with “File not found”. This situation isn’t fixed by a rebuild of the media library as it doesn’t check for file link validity. Worse still, there’s no one-click bulk delete for the favourites (there is for playlists), so you might need to reset to factory defaults to clear them all. It also means that your generated playlists cannot be backed up to the computer either, however, you can share relative-path playlists from the computer to the X1. Another small niggle is that the playlists are created with generic names such as “Playlist 1”, and cannot be changed.

Selecting the second option from the main menu allows you to browse your media database by all songs, by album, by artist, by genre, by favourites list or by playlists.

Selection of the playback settings menu allows you to select the current playback mode, whether you want to resume the song from the position or from the song or not at all on a reboot (handy for audiobooks), have gapless playback (it seemed to be hit and miss), set volume limiter, equalizer (works well, but limited in bands), and balance.

Hardcore music fans will probably be a little disappointed that there are no other DSP-related options like cross-feed which can improve the listenability of hard-panned stereo tracks.

The settings menu is also packed with some options which are worth exploring. The update media library option is a necessary selection to make every time you update the files on the card. As you can just drag and drop, without need for synchronization software like iTunes, the player has to rebuild its database otherwise the new songs are only accessible via the file structure menu. Likewise, you can choose the keys available while locked, how long to time out to a lock screen, adjust the brightness, have idle power-off, sleep timer, select line-out or headphone output, theme colour, headphone control, set language and format card.

This unit came pre-loaded with F/W 1.1 which is the latest version firmware at this time. The unit itself, when connected via USB for data transfer will show up as a mass storage device and charge simultaneously. When connected to a charger, it will only charge. It doesn’t seem possible to have it attached to power and playing back at the same time, so this might be a disappointment to some where the 11 hours of battery life is insufficient. No USB DAC, photo slideshow, clock features are available, in case you were wondering.

The unit was charged in about 3-4 hours with an initial charging current of 840-870mA measured. This implies a slower charge would occur using a regular USB port.

The unit was auditioned with a set of FLAC files and my favourite AudioTechnica M50x, ANC9, as well as the Sony MDR-10R, and UE 100 in ear headphones. I was very happy with the clarity and tightness of the audio with flat EQ on the M50x and ANC9s, being equal to or better than the sound cards that I normally use day to day. Switching to the MDR-10R showed just how bassy and “subdued” the treble was, and gave me a chance to test the EQ which brought things to passable but not optimal results. Using the basic UE 100’s, I confirmed that the output was as quiet as I imagined, hearing pretty much no hiss in the background at all.

The audio stage is pretty amazing for the price, and I can understand the allure of the player based on having listened to it “do its thing”. I also then loaded some 256kbit/s AAC-LC encoded files which it handled with aplomb, which was nice to see. Overall, the 5-segment battery indicator seemed decently accurate, but it is voltage-referenced, and so tends to jump around a little when on the edge of one of the five segments. The actual battery life experienced was pretty much right as claimed.

Testing

This leads me to the obvious question – how awesome is the audio stage exactly? Unfortunately, I don’t really have the serious level of gear to find out, but I could still rig up some basic tests with the Picoscope 2205A just to confirm its operation. For this, I also loaded a set of test files in WAV format to the player – including 1khz sine, and full-range sweeps for 32khz, 44.1khz, 48khz, 88.2khz, 96khz, 192khz sample rates, and square wave signals at 44.1khz and 192khz. Left channel was connected to Ch A of the Picoscope, and Right channel to Ch B. No load was present, so the effective load was 1Mohm, and the player was set to line-out. This gives the best possible result you can expect – with headphones, some imperfections may occur due to the loading and “interaction” of the load’s impedance with the output stage.

Lets start with a basic quiet signal check:

Keeping in mind that the scope itself only has 8-bits and the channels might be mismatched at the scope, this gives us a baseline of about -60dB being the limit of sensible measurement. The spike at DC is probably due to DC offset voltage.

Now putting on the 1khz sine signal, we can see that both channels are pretty decently matched in the time domain. The output voltage swing is a pretty impressive 1.479V and 1.486V RMS.

Checking it in the frequency domain, it seems that there isn’t any serious detected IMD spikes (harmonically related), with more of it likely noise, unlike with some of my other older AC97-based soundcards.

Sweeps of at different sample rates give us an idea of what the frequency response is like. Do ignore the “dipping” everywhere – that is related to the sweep speed. We can see the 32k, 44.1k, 48k, 88.2k, 96k, and 192k sweeps as follows:

It seems very positive that a proper anti-aliasing filter is used, possibly a digital one, tailored to the sample rate. This means that there is less of an issue of compromise when playing audio of different sample rates. It also means that ultrasonics in higher sample rate files (>48khz) are actually being reproduced to the output, but at varying degrees. Approximate 3dB bandwidths are as follows:

• At 32khz sample rate – 15.49khz
• At 44.1khz sample rate – 21.32khz
• At 48khz sample rate – 23.29khz
• At 88.2khz sample rate – 40.99khz
• At 96khz sample rate – 44.05khz
• At 192khz sample rate – 43.98khz

The only exception was at 192khz, where the slope of the curve seems to imply other bandwidth-limiting components in the audio path causing the 3dB point to still remain at the 44khz area. Technically, this isn’t really important for audio as the supposed range for human hearing isn’t really above 22khz anyway, however from a pure signals point of view, it can be seen that there is some impact along the chain.

We can try to provoke this with a square wave signal – here is the result of a 1khz square wave signal being reproduced from a file at 44.1khz sample rate.

The effect of the anti-aliasing filter can be seen in the “ringing” around the edges – this is expected behaviour as the 44.1khz sampling rate signal after it has been low-passed is missing the higher harmonics that square up the signal.

The attenuation of the higher harmonics can easily be seen at the frequency view. Zooming into the transition, we can see a relatively “relaxed” slew rate of about 0.2V/uS.

But make a square wave on a 192khz sample rate file and the FiiO can really show just what it’s capable of.

When called upon, higher harmonics are available – not that you’ll be able to hear these … and not that most equipment can actually reproduce it …

Strangely, some evidence of IMD can be seen on the right channel – although this may also be scope related. Due to the limited resolution of the oscilloscope and its PC-based nature, I’d have to be cautious about reading too much into it. However, the profile of the harmonics follows the expected shape until the filter starts killing it towards fs/2. The slew rate is even higher at almost 0.5V/us … which is expected.

Conclusion

It seems that this item shows just how it is possible to get excellent quality audio at a “budget” price. However, in true FiiO style, the unit itself does suffer from a lack of polish when it comes to firmware in terms of user interface, usability and possibly even battery life. The USB interface on it is a little slow as well, and the quirks with a 5800 song limit on the database (not well documented) can catch users by surprise.

While some of the issues could be dealbreakers for some, there are ways to work around or reduce their impact, and it doesn’t diminish the fact that the output quality of the player is excellent. I look forward to future firmware updates which might help make this unit even more desirable, but if you lament the loss of the iPod classic, maybe it’s not so bad after all.

EDIT: Accidentally published early, actually finished off the review and updated within 20 minutes.