Ethereals Fiio X1 MP3 Player Review

Hardware Other Hardware
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Fiio X1 MP3 Player Review

Initial thoughts-

What’s in the box?
It comes in a package with the device, a rubber case, a couple of skins (wood, ‘merican flag, carbon). A user manual and a few screen protectors (one pre installed) and of course the charging cable. It doesn’t have any onboard storage so a microSD card must be bought separately for the device to operate. I currently am using a Samsung Evo 64GB sd card (it supports up to 128GB). It worked perfectly as soon as I plugged it in.

Sound Quality
I find the audio to be quite flat, leaving it up to the headphones for all the sound. This is nice, it keeps the music the way it’s meant to be heard. Although it does have a built it EQ that can used if you so desire. It goes quite loud, has a 1-100 levels of volume, sitting in a quiet room the volume is at 65 and seems very comfortable for listening (Note that I am using D7 770 Pro 250 Ohm headphones). On a plane or in a very loud environment it should do a swell job at keeping the volume at a high enough listening level (this is also up to your headphones, keeping a proper seal and all). I also tested with some plain apple ear buds, in a quiet room it took a volume level of 30 to reach a nice listening level. The Fiio has more than enough power for lower impedance devices.

Other thoughts
It is easy enough to use, the buttons are clear and responsive. It has a wheel to navigate through the menus, kind of like the old school iPods. It claims 11 hours of playback, but it’s still charging, I will post again when I figure out how long it actually lasts.

I won’t post the exact tech specs because you guys are smart and can probably Google any of those questions. If you have any others just let me know, I’ll be using this quite frequently. I will put a link at the bottom to where I bought it on amazon.

1 Like
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I've been thinking about buying one of these for a while. Do you ever have any problems when transferring music? I use iTunes and have had issues in the past transferring my library to non apple device.

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As long as its not Itunes DRM it should be fine. When it's plugged in it just reads as an SD card.

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How's the screen?
Is glare particularly bad? Easy to read from outdoors etc?
Fiio X1 nerd.

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Is it blind guy certified?

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It's easy to see, it also has physical buttons, so you don't really have to look at the screen too much. It gets quite bright as well. Also @Zippy_Parmesian it depends on how blind we are talking. lol

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So would you say it was a worth while purchase over just using a smart phone paired with a mayflower electronics CMOY portable? I mean the mayflower is $25 cheaper. Is the audio quality just above and beyond what you'd find on a high end smartphone? Or is it just louder?

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Is it a worthwhile purchase over smartphone audio? It depends on the phone, for me personally my phone didn't have enough storage for my music. So in that regard yes, it was worth it. The audio is flat and clean and can go quite loud. Much louder than a smartphone. I've never used a CMOY so I can't compare it to that. The quality is quite good though.

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450/20 in the right and 1600/20 in the left.

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Jesus, well, if it helps its not any easier or harder to see than an iPod classic.