Fiio X1-II $139.90

This is a very different device to the other two. You might think of the first two as akin to the iPod touch, albeit high-resolution capable, in being highly versatile, with access to all manner of apps. In that analogy, the Fiio X1-II is more akin to an iPod classic, albeit again a high-resolution version.

So there’s no Android lurking in this one. Instead it uses a proprietary control system with a touch-sensitive wheel scrolling through menus and selecting options. The colour display occupies a section near the top, and it is for display only, not interactive via touch sensitivity.

And it arrives with no user memory built in. You must have a micro SD card to store your music. Once a card’s in place, you can plug the X1-II into a computer and drag music into it. There’s only one card slot, but it will accommodate a card of up to 256GB capacity.

There’s no Wi-Fi here. There is Bluetooth, but with no word as to the supported codecs, which usually means that it’s the base-level SBC codec and nothing else. I found the control system a little fiddly initially, but gradually I came to master it.

It might be considered an advantage in a portable device that the X1-II is considerably smaller than the others here, and much lighter. Its body is more rounded, but still with a quite sturdy metal construction. It comes with some front panel protectors and decorative skins.

The sole output for this player is the headphone socket on the bottom, along with the card slot. But you can set this to a line mode which fixes the output level.

Technically it falls short of the others in file handling, though it seems somewhat churlish to say so given this is a sub-$150 player. Especially when it’s still happy with so much. It supports PCM-based files up to 192kHz and 32 bits, and covers FLAC, APE, ALAC, WAV and AIFF on the lossless front, as well as the usual lossy suspects. Missing entirely is DSD.

One other weakness was apparent during my tests — a 1dB mismatch between the left and right channels.

Nor could I quite get the 100 milli watts into 16 ohms that Fiio claims for the X1-II — not at low distortion levels, anyway. But I did get 76 milli watts into my 15.9 ohm load at 100Hz, and a bit more at 1002Hz and 10,000Hz. You’re looking at about 19dB more volume than the sensitivity rating of your low-impedance headphones, which in almost all cases will be thoroughly loud. For high impedance headphones — well, my test load is 300 ohms, but Fiio says they’re for headphones of up to 100 ohms, so I was testing out of spec. They managed over 9dB above 1mW, so respectable levels ought to be available even on such headphones.