HIGH-RES PORTABLES
Three high-res music players, three very different prices, yet all three of them great performers for both home and away. So why the significant price differential?
Three high-res music players at three very different prices — what’s the reason?
Previously we’ve looked at how well various smartphones go as music players. And typically they go from somewhere between adequate to really rather nice. But there are several advantages still to having a separate portable music player. They’re entirely optimised for music. Extended musical enjoyment won’t leave you with a dead phone battery, nor will music fill up your phone’s memory to the exclusion of other joys. And the best portable players can double as a music source in the home, where it might be inconvenient to plumb your phone into the hi-fi. Since those are just the kind of things we worry about, we dig here into three dedicated music players, covering quite a price range.
Two are from Fiio, a Chinese brand which aims to deliver high-res audio players at more affordable prices than some rivals, and which notes high on its wish-list the laudable aspiration “to raise the reputation of ‘Made in China’”. The third is from Pioneer, which has, along with stablemate Onkyo’s very similar models, delivered a series of high-res portables in recent years also challenging the higher priced brands while bringing some impressive innovations and firsts.
And let’s not beat about the bush — straight off we can tell you that all three of these players worked with all our headphones and earphones to produce high and low levels of truly excellent sound, to the point where distinguishing between them in simple audio playback performance terms proved to be difficult. But at the limits, and in functionality, there were certainly differences. How much you want to pay will depend as much on facilities and abilities as it does on sound...
TAKING MEASUREMENTS: I checked the maximum output levels by running full-scale sine waves at three di erent frequencies into the stated loads, backing o the volume where necessary to eliminate visible clipping from the waveform as inspected on an oscilloscope.
For the frequency response graphs shown above, I ran the devices into the 15.9-ohm test load at an output just above (and as close as possible to) 0.5 volts RMS at 1kHz full scale. I could have achieved a better noise floor with a higher output, but the reality is that 0.5 volts RMS full scale is typically higher than listening levels. All three devices performed better than -94dBA on noise, even with 16-bit test signals. No one is going to be troubled by noise at such a low level.
PIONEER XDP-300R: The 44.1kHz output rolled o rather early, to be down by over 3dB at 20kHz. There are three filter slopes available. Switching from the default ‘Sharp’ to ‘Slow’ reduced the HF even more by a very small extra amount.
FIIO X5-III: The X5 has several DAC filter settings. The default one was called ‘Short delay Sharp Roll-O ’ and the first time I measured the frequency response with CD-standard audio, it rolled o very early. I selected ‘Sharp Roll-o ’ and the unit delivered high frequencies out flat
to beyond 20kHz and then chopped everything else o .
FIIO X1-II: No fancy DAC filter choices with this unit. Instead, it just delivered out to beyond 20kHz with CD-standard music. For some reason with 192kHz sampling it dropped the bass output below 50 hertz by about half a decibel. This was also shown on test graphs from Fii O’s own website.
For specifications and comparisons, see the grid overleaf...