The Walkman ZX300A is probably one of the more honest players Sony has put out recently. First off, the chip. It uses Sony’s newly developed S-Master chip, which is a higher hardware revision than what’s in the Black Brick and Gold Brick, and it supports more features too. In theory the sound should be on par with those high-end models, and the price is still low — the Chinese domestic version seems to be under 3000, which is downright reasonable compared to the Black Brick, the Gold Brick, and the “Sony Sixty Thousand.” So anyway, I’m broke, I can’t afford a Black Brick, and this is all I can manage. It has every feature I need, and I’m pretty happy listening to it. Then comes the even better part: this thing keeps getting firmware updates, and the latest one is a bombshell.

I was using the FiiO X7 along with the Sony Walkman A35, but juggling two devices was a hassle, and the Sony WM1A was out of my budget. Then the ZX300 came along at a middle price point, with the China model being the ZX300A. I put in a pre-order, and after attending Sony’s listening event I felt it was acceptable, so I didn’t cancel. It finally arrived a while back, and I’ve been listening for two weeks now—mostly satisfied.

I only signed up out of boredom, and then I actually got invited. I’d almost forgotten about it, glanced at my phone and remembered, so I hopped on my bike and went.

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.

As a FiiO X5K user, I can’t say the FiiO X7’s hardware upgrades excite me much. I never bothered reading closely about which chips it upgraded or what tech it uses, because sound-wise the X5K already satisfies me — at least it has way more driving power than the ZX1, and the basics are good enough. Tuning is all smoke and mirrors anyway; you can fix it with earbuds. But one thing about the X5K always grated on me: the UI. FiiO already has the best UI among Chinese DAPs, but the X5K’s godawful dot-matrix font and lack of touch support drove me crazy after getting used to Sony’s stuff. Browsing for songs was a nightmare. And the kicker: even though the X5K handles album art and other metadata well enough, song names in the file list still show up as filenames. I was stuck navigating piles of 1.XXXX-XXX.flac, and since a lot of them start with album numbers, sorting to find anything was hopeless. I gave up on that idea. You can probably guess what I’m getting at. The biggest win of the X7 for me is the brand-new touch-controlled UI. When I first heard FiiO was making an Android player, I was worried about a Chinese Android playback UI — figured the best case was it barely escaping the shanzhai smell. But after the product came out and I watched some overseas review videos, it surprised me quite a bit. No need to beat around the bush: honestly, this UI is already pretty great.

Before this I was using a plain car mount. Nothing wrong with it, except it blocks the air vent. In summer that’s tolerable — the cold air blows on the device and cools it down. In winter it’s a problem: the phone is already warm, and blowing more hot air on it makes it completely useless. So I started looking for a replacement, and one day on eBay I found this…

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.

In my second year of high school I got 500 yuan of New Year’s money, and I wanted to spend it on something. While poking around TomPDA I came across a Sony Walkman E505. Seller said it was an OEM pack, bare unit, just over 500. 50 hours of battery life, and it looked good enough. So I bought it without a second thought. To be honest, at first I didn’t care much about the specs or the sound quality. I just thought it looked nice, and that 50-hour claim was tempting. I had an iPAQ Hx2410 at the time, but its battery life was a tragic 5 hours. This was 50 hours. Even with 320Kbps MP3s stuffed in it I could still get 20 hours. That meant I basically never had to think about the battery. One charge and I could mess around with it for a week. High school was miserable every day, so getting to listen to more music was heaven. To use a phrase people use now, it was a “massive happiness upgrade” kind of gadget.

I do have a Sony ZX1, but it broke a few days ago… Okay, actually it got rained on and water got inside, so I played dumb and sent it to after-sales. They could tell it was water damage, but in the end they decided to honor the warranty anyway. “The motherboard has to be ordered, no idea when it’ll be fixed. We’ll call you when it arrives.” That’s what the repair center told me… So I found a new excuse to spend money: I bought an iPod Classic 160G on Taobao (now eBay). No idea if it’s new or not, but it looks pretty new. I’m not asking much from this thing, cheap is good enough. I’m not an Apple cultist, I hate iTunes, and all my music is FLAC, so I decided to flash the freshly-arrived iPod Classic with Rockbox for more freedom and format support. This is what it looks like after flashing.