Living with FiiO X7

I’ve been using the FiiO X7 for a while now, and there are a few problems:

• When playing songs, it stalls once at intervals ranging from 30 seconds to 1 minute; the stall lasts about 20 seconds before playback resumes.
• Battery life feels like it should be around the official 9 hours, but standby is a real weak point. It ought to have auto-shutdown.
• Any artist name in English gets displayed in all caps.
• Firmware updates can only be done by copying to an SD card—it’s supposedly a smart device but doesn’t support Wi-Fi updates.
• The breathing light stays on constantly, which is light pollution at night.
• The machine formats cards as exfat, which doesn’t support long file names.

So I was grumbling about all this when I saw FiiO had released firmware 1.3. The update method is the same as for older devices, but 1.3 did fix quite a few things.

• First, the breathing light is now configurable.
• Second, there’s now a mode that auto-shuts down after a set number of minutes in standby, so long standby periods won’t drain much battery. Overall it should now beat the ZX1.

But the most infuriating problem—playback stopping—still isn’t fixed. I emailed FiiO, and they suggested I try a different card.

When I first bought the X7, I happened to pick up that Kingston 128G TF card on special for 299 yuan on JD.com. Lots of people said it was a good card, so I figured it probably wasn’t the card’s fault—but I thought about it and got a Samsung 128G EVO anyway. Once it arrived, the problem was solved. I didn’t expect the FiiO X7 to be picky about cards, though of course I can’t rule out that it was just that card. My previous TF cards were almost never Kingston—they were Transcend, Samsung, or SanDisk.

What also got solved was the long file name transfer problem caused by exfat. The answer: manually format the card as ntfs. A lot of people say exfat is the best format for TF cards, but who cares what they say?

Finally, FiiO released a new glass screen protector and stickers for the X7. I got them set up and it looks good—glass protector plus Kevlar sticker, quite nice.