FiiO X3 2nd Gen Mp3 Player

The X3 is the heart of FiiO's selection of high resolution digital music players, now in its 2nd generation with all new updated circuitry and exterior design. The X3 supports all of the popular lossless formats in your music library, including WAV, FLAC, APE, WMA, ALAC, and AIFF.

Design

Measuring just 96 x 57 x 16 mm, the X3 is comes in compact form factor and is housed in all aluminium alloy chassis. The titanium color gives refreshing look and feel to the player. The scroll wheel is easy to spin and is fairly sensitive. The physical buttons around the scroll wheel are well placed for one handed operation and each click is quite distinct and are also labeled well. Aux-in and line out ports are housed at top, bottom houses micro-USB port while the power and volume controls are located at left side of device.

User Interface and Features

The 2" TFT screen is easy to read and navigate but is not as bright and crisp as IPS screens. The play menu settings include Play mode (normal, shuffle, repeat track, repeat all), Setting maximum and default volume, Play through folders setting etc. Other functions including adjusting brightness, screen timeout, updating media library etc can be accessed in system settings. Apart from volume buttons to raise or lower the volume, you can also use scroll wheel to do the same. Just hold the middle button for 2 seconds and then spin the wheel clockwise for raising or anticlockwise for lowering the volume. The screen at currently played track displays info about the song, its sampling rate.

The player does not have any in-built memory and plays songs from micro-SD card.(supports upto 128GB). It took around 4 hours to charge the battery which at one go delivered a playback of 11 hours.

Sound Quality

In order to cater to the audiophiles, the FiiO X3 2nd gen comes equipped two crystal oscillators, one each for the 44.1kHz and 48kHz frequency multiples. This no-compromise design ensures the lowest jitter and highest precision for playback of music at all sample rates, eliminating all conversion artifacts. The sound quality delivered by the mp3 player is excellent wherein listeners can experience fine details of audio like subtlety, depth, pressure, expression etc. When we listened to hi-resolution audio format songs it revealed every music nuance with startling integrity from powerful sub-bass lows to crystalline highs bringing listeners closer to the original performance.