Fii O X5-III $549

This is the third generation of the Fiio X5. The practise on Gens 1 and 2 has clearly paid off in a device which matches the Pioneer in many respects, yet costs considerably less than half the price. It’s also quite a bit smaller, slightly less angular, and has a smaller, lower resolution screen. And the Wi-Fi is single rather than dual-band. Yet those things matter little when it comes to music playing.

Again, there’s a proper volume control — the edge of a wheel this time, rather than an old-fashioned knob. The other controls are power, play/pause and track skip.

This Fiio also runs the Marshmallow version of Android, and it also has 32GB of storage, a fair chunk of which is consumed by the OS. But on the side are two premium phone-style trays for adding micro SD storage, rather than spring-loaded slots — just that little bit neater. Each can hold a 256GB card, which makes for half a terabyte in total.

You can take advantage of that space with music in a real plethora of formats. It falls short of the Pioneer in supporting DSD only up to double-speed DSD128, should the provision of quad-DSD be essential to you. On the other hand it adds such other formats as WMA Lossless and several variations on the APE codec.

There’s Bluetooth support here too, again with SBC and apt X, but again without AAC.

This player is particularly strong on outputs. There’s the standard 3.5mm headphone socket, a 2.5mm one for balanced headphones, plus a further 3.5mm output. This last can be switched between analogue line and coaxial digital. There’s also a gain switch, so you can globally limit output levels if you like.

Fiio tosses around ludicrous claims as to the amount of output this unit can produce. I mean, really, 480 milli watts into 16-ohm loads? That’s like an order of magnitude greater than lots of competing devices. So of course... oh, wait. Yes it can! At my various test frequencies it pulled off an astonishing 460 to 486 milli watts with the volume jammed up to the maximum, without the slightest hint of clipping. What that means is no limitations. Low impedance headphones can go greater than 26 decibels more than their sensitivity rating. Because of the high maximum output voltage — just about 3V — even 300-ohm headphones can be delivered almost 30 milli watts, which takes them nearly 15dB above their sensitivity rating. This player can deliver any volume level you like.

Perhaps it might be best to leave the gain control on ‘Low’ rather than ‘High’ after all...