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.

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.

Audiophile mysticism is mysticism because so much of it can only be felt, not explained, and often can’t even be put into words. The vocabulary grows with the years. Back when I was in high school, most of it was “bass extends moderately, highs are transparent, mids are sweet, good resolution.” Now it’s “wide soundstage, bass loose vs. tight, mids forward vs. too far back.” I don’t know about the rest, but “extends” is a word I haven’t seen in ages. Another trait of the mysticism is that it can’t be expressed precisely and has no unified standard. Plenty of gurus like to measure frequency response curves with pro gear, but nobody tells you what curve counts as “female-vocal poison,” what curve counts as a “wide soundstage,” what curve counts as “pop tuning.” And the funniest part: even if you produce the curve, someone will tell you music isn’t for looking at, it’s for listening to, and how it sounds is what matters… I don’t get it. I really don’t. There are also plenty of weird terms in this mysticism that can’t be explained, or you can’t even say what they mean. Recently I heard two of them: “musicality” and “monitor style.” Someone said the Sony D100 recorder isn’t suited for listening to music, and gave a reason. “Sure, this thing crushes the ZX1 in every way, but the sound is too cold, too dry, too monitor-flat, too compressed, no musicality. It’s not as smooth as the ZX1 and PHA-2.” I didn’t know sound could be heard as “smooth,” or that sound has a taste… and that it fails on taste even while crushing everything else on every count… So what exactly is musicality? What is monitor style? And how is the D100 as a music player, for a device that’s a voice recorder? After reading a pile of guru talk I got nothing usable out of it, so I had to listen for myself.