Living with FiiO X5K

A long time ago I didn’t like Chinese DAPs. They were ugly and the battery life was bad.

Later the battery life at least improved a bit, getting into double digits at least, but they were still ugly.

So now we’ve reached the point where Chinese DAPs finally look not-terrible and have passable battery life, but the gap in software experience is still a real wound.

This is a fundamental gap. While world-class portable players give you all sorts of comfortable control experiences, our Chinese DAPs are still way behind on the basic function of “searching for songs.” All we can do is pull out “but our sound quality is better” to console ourselves, but the number of audiophiles willing to give up usability is small after all, and long-term self-numbing inside a small circle only leaves you further stuck in place.

Fortunately, a manufacturer is finally willing to break through, and that’s FiiO.

The latest FiiO X1/X3/X5 series always gets mocked as gas stoves, but in practice they’re not that hard to accept. After reading the FiiO designer’s account of his design process, I think it makes a fair amount of sense, and more importantly, FiiO’s UI is arguably the strongest among Chinese DAPs. The rest of them are what, crap?

The reason I bought this thing is simple: I need a player in my car doing LO output into the AUX jack. What I had on hand was only the D100 and PHA-2. The A15 + PHA-2 combo sounds good, but I don’t make a habit of mounting a pack of explosives on my dashboard. I heard the FiiO X5’s LO output was good, so I picked one up to check. Absolutely not because I auditioned it at the local “Yudian Audio” in Zhengzhou and got recommended into buying it by a very cute shop owner.

The X5 is now in its second generation. There are pictures of it all over the internet, and I can’t be bothered to describe it, so I’ll just talk about what surprised me.

First, the output power is big. As expected of a Chinese DAP — plugging in my Audio-Technica IM03, I got a flavor different from Sony’s magic. At the edges of the soundstage I heard more detail. Mind you, that’s an effect I only got from my external PHA-2 with one level of boost enabled, and the FiiO X5K does it easily.

Second, the Hi-Fi tuning. The mainstream opinion on Headphone Everyone Forum is that Walkman and the like are crap — low output power, distorted output, not Hi-Fi at all. After listening to the FiiO X5K for a while, I deeply agree. Compared to Walkman, the FiiO X5K not only has more power, its sound is very balanced: low, high, and mid frequencies, main tones and details, all presented to you equally, with no sense of something missing. The Walkman ZX1, on the other hand, emphasizes the vocal performance of pop music more, and some corner details are hard to notice (though you can’t say they’re absent).

Finally, the controls. The gap between the FiiO X5K’s controls and the Android-based Walkman ZX1 is fundamental, but there’s no longer an obvious gap versus the Walkman A15. Searching songs and skipping tracks is no longer a big problem, playlists support offline customization, and copying songs is just copy-paste. The old Walkman Linux support trick still applies, and copy speeds under Linux are actually faster than under Windows. The scroll wheel isn’t like Apple’s — according to FiiO staff, Apple has a patent so there’s nothing to be done. Fine. At least this wheel isn’t hard to use.

And amusingly, FiiO put a blue light on the power button to show whether the device is working or sleeping.

Beyond the surprises, what’s left are the problems:

First, FiiO’s battery life. The official spec says 10 hours, but this thing charges too slowly, and! even the battery percentage is unreliable. Twice I’ve had it hit 20% and then shut down not long after. By the way, if you turn on high gain, the battery life is definitely under 10 hours, only shorter. So output power does come at a cost.

I’d originally heard the X5K has a deep sleep mode, and figured deep sleep wouldn’t drain battery, so real-world use could crush the ZX1 — after all, 80% of the ZX1’s battery is wasted on standby. But it seems that’s still not the case.

Second, song search and support. It supports various file types, tags, and cover art, but there are still cases where covers won’t display. Also, in song search you can’t search by song title — only by filename. If, like me, some of your filenames are 10001.flac, then you’re screwed: you have to play it to see what it is…

More importantly, there’s no alphabetical index. The ZX1 even supports hiragana indexing, and the A15 at least supports pinyin.

Last is lock-screen operation. By default the X5K’s lock is global — only the power button works — but then you can’t operate it blindly, so you have to change it so that “power, play/pause, and up/down track” all work while locked. The result is you constantly accidentally hit that play/pause button (it’s in the middle, after all). That’s nasty, and there’s no way to change it.

Overall, the FiiO X5K, within its positioning, is a Chinese DAP very much worth buying. Its sound I’d call a typical Hi-Fi fine-tuned sound: no character, just pure presentation of the sound. This means some earphones I loved on the ZX1 get knocked back to their original form when plugged into the X5K — like the Sennheiser IE80, whose recessed mids I’m reminded of again… But some earphones that need a bit of power perform better on the X5K.

You can’t say whose sound is better or worse between Chinese DAPs and Walkman and the like. I think Walkman tunes the tone for music, while Chinese DAPs are more true to the source — after all, they’re looking at frequency response curves. If that line isn’t straight, you can’t even advertise on the fight forum, right?

I think the FiiO X5K’s biggest improvement is:

This thing finally knows how to shield phone signals! No more headphones going crazy when a call comes in!

Also, as a Chinese manufacturer, FiiO really understands Chinese needs. Whether it’s the screen coming with a protector already applied, or throwing in various cheap silicone cases that plenty of people would buy anyway, it all shows how shrewd this company is. Being that smart, it won’t do too badly in the future at least.

Finally, because of the battery life and lock-screen issues this thing is a bit of a pain. I’ve temporarily stuck two 64GB TF cards in it and left it in the car, with LO output to AUX, and the result is satisfying. Even if it runs out of power, I can pull out a MicroUSB cable to charge it. Oh right, that’s exactly why I bought it in the first place…

Overall, I bought the right thing after all.