FiiO M3K review – a pocketable-high quality audio player (2018)
accessibleaudio.co
accessibleaudio.co
I recently got a baby monitor - there's plenty of IoT enabled wifi ones which use your phone as the display, but the one I chose was simple and standalone. It just works. No software, no app, no security implications. I can give it to someone else and it'll work for them too.
I wonder what other areas of our life we should be unbundling again into appliances?
Plus dedicated physical buttons! FiiO provides a rotary volume control on their flagship $1000 player, https://audiosolace.com/2020/09/04/fiio-m15-review/
And that no software automatically dials back the volume every 10-15 minutes with a notification telling me that it's convinced I'm damaging my ears.
I miss the days when you pay for some set of functionality and it stays with the device for the duration of ownership. The standard seems to be to buy on one set of value propositions and to find them degraded over time (see Peloton eliminating Apple Watch support for all exercises but cycling this week as a recent example). I think this is what makes Tesla special with regular OTA updates increasing functionality.
Sounds like too much to ask?
This is what Linux distributions has been providing for decades. And my 486 PC was less powerful than some thermostat.
I don't need the company to be bankrolling a $2mm/yr AI team so that the thermostat can try to make better guess about when I want to turn on the heat.
I always marvel at the people who built new homes with subfloor heating systems who usually have a closet full of manifolds, valves, custom PCBs-in-a-box, none of which will be available in a decade or two.
In addition, even if well supported (like Tesla), there's a number of product families that are priced like long term investments (electric cars, solar panel/battery setups) but have shorter term PC-style turnovers in technology. They may still work, but will be obsolete.
I think the only solution is to try to build as minimally as possible. A huge amount can be accomplished through passive heating and cooling (windows placement and size, site location and angle toward prevailing winds and morning / afternoon sun, etc etc). We are too often reliant on technology to allow us to ignore these things and we do so at our peril.
lol. If you mean 'design', you'd be surprised. Admittedly, I'm not aware of the full array of residential heating control systems, but I've sure seen some over-complex ones.
My general take on home design is simple-passive-accessible. Someone in the future will thank you.
It's worth poking around manufacturer's websites. http://www.pexheat.com/Catalog/Controls
and consider the lifespan of a house vs. the lifespan of the subsystems. My general take is that the more built-in and difficult to modify it is, the madder someone will be in 50 years. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm no fan of radiant heating systems having seen the issues of parts availability, latency, the tearing up of floors for repair,and a strong preference for point sources of heat (gas stoves for example), so it might show through in the comment.
When you get bored, list all of your connected home and personal items that rely on wired, cable, wifi, bluetooth, rfid, infrared, cellular, etc. Put them in a spreadsheet.
Then you will not be as surprised when your lighting system, refrigerator, or washer/dryer is hit with ransomware.
I think that's the primary value proposition for Apple HomeKit and I'm really quite sad that more companies, and Apple themselves, don't put more effort into supporting it.
That's why it'll be increasingly hard to get a dumb TV, because after-sales profits keep going without having to make anything.
Is it like a wired connection between the Camera and the Monitor?
https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2017/02/watteam-powerbeat-gen2-p...
There’s one somewhere near me that broadcasts crystal clear audio on 49.990MHz - right smack on the edge of the 6 metre band in very crisp 15khz wide FM. This audio quality beats all my local ham radio buddies. I can hear a pin drop in their house.
I’ve no idea who’s house, briefly before the pandemic i made a reasonable effort to track down the house and let them know, it’s not a house in my street, no one has the young children that can be heard.
Every time I’m on 6m i always see it on my band scope, 20db over.
Depending on where you are, it's possible that stress from knowing that their child monitor is unsecured is much higher than the risk of anyone within broadcast range abusing the vulnerability. Moreover, it's possible that whatever they replace the device with will have more significant problems to worry about. For example cloud vulnerable to the whole world instead of enthusiasts with radios in a small local area.
A device such as this barely obsoletes as long as the audio codecs can still be handled; you can easily switch batteries on these relatively "simple" devices, too.
The most glaring omission is the built in player has no concept of a music queue. You cannot decide to play a new song while listening; the only way to queue up music is to create a playlist ahead of time.
You can't install new apps via the Play Store from what I can tell. By default it whitelists what can be installed over a usb cable. Luckily you can remove the whitelist and install any apk you want by clicking on a particular page in the settings 6 times (iirfc). I ended up installing Poweramp this way and it turned my opinion of the purchase from a massive disappointment into a mild one.
Other complaints are that they advertise Airplay compatibility but it turns out it's for receiving only, not sending. So you can send music from your iPhone to the FiiO and have it send it out from there using the FiiO's DAC. I was hoping to actually use Airplay to send to my home receiver from the FiiO, but that isn't possible. I use Bluetooth instead, but the range isn't great and when I scroll through my library while music plays I get skipping (possibly because the Poweramp app is hogging cpu, but again, the built in app for playing music is a non-starter for me).
I would really love for there to be a dedicated music player that went above and beyond in terms of user experience as well as audio quality, but for me the FiiO M6 at least isn't it.
I would think that Android is overkill for a player like this and running a full OS would lower audio quality, but everything is so powerful these days it may not make a practical difference.
This is why Rockbox exists, which is available for the M3K: https://rockbox.org
- Getting new music or Podcasts requires plugging it in to a real computer, transferring files, and updating the media library. It takes a while.
- Without a touchscreen you can't "scrub" through files and must fast-forward with the buttons. Fast-forwarding to your place in a 90-minute podcast takes a while.
- If you plug it in while in the middle of a podcast, or reboot it, it will lose your place many times. It has a setting to not do this but it is unreliable.
- Due to the above two points I really got in the habit of ensuring I had enough time to listen to a full show in one shot, and that made me subscribe to less podcasts. This is a plus.
- You cannot view show notes for a podcast or click on links in those notes. You must sit down at a PC to do this.
- This device helped me to not take my phone with me everywhere. That's a plus.
- It doesn't "fast charge" or anything. The battery indicator is imprecise so sometimes it will shut off while you're using it. The battery lasts forever so that's OK.
You have to want to use something like this. It is better for you brain than a smartphone. I encourage everyone to try it. It is high quality, built well, and inexpensive, so very much worth a shot. If you want a bluetooth and USB-C version, the Fiio M5 is also good.
As I see it, none of what you listed has practical benefits. That's why we have Spotify and all the software to overcome these drawbacks.
Perhaps "slow tech" is a thing, but certainly not widespread or advantageous.
The downsides all wind up being worth it to me because I'm starting from the premise of "I want my smartphone as far away from me as often as possible". It allows me to decouple the primary reason I'd carry my smartphone, and carry something less unwanted instead. I'm guessing you can figure out the reasons; feeds, notifications, alerts, an operating system built for annoyance/addiction that is not Free Software, etc.
Really, though, I encourage you to try it out. Think about how much more time you had to think while walking your dog or something 20 years ago.
This is an excellent point. I recently mused about how all my ideas for writing articles come in the shower, and your comment made me realize it's because I have nothing to distract me.
I'll try removing distractions/being bored more often, thanks!
Audio/DAC quality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26871983
The software, honestly, is not nearly as bad as "alibaba junk". It is just fine. The iPod's software is more thought-out and consistent. The Fiio software is much more user friendly than Rockbox though. It responds well and hardly ever crashes. It has all the settings you'd expect and then some. It will be annoying if you expect perfection, but it never skips tracks on its own, the buttons always do what you want, settings aren't reset on you. The M5 is more fiddly than the M3K but I usually use the M5 anyway. I'm willing to tolerate the less-than-perfect software.
My brain says this audio is certainly better since I paid a lot of money for it, but my ears are in disagreement. Perhaps it’s because I suffer from tinnitus.
Is anyone else in the same boat?
Is it worth the money? Honestly I'm not sure. I probably could've gotten there with an investment of $500-1000. But now I have a beautiful piece of hardware that might last a decade or two.
On the setup I have 128k/transcoded MP3 also definitely has less interesting detail than higher quality files.
Twenty years ago, such files would have been barely listenable. Ten years ago, this would have been tolerable but obviously compromised. Today, with the best encoders, 128k MP3s are shockingly good. Certainly not perfect. But good.
MP3 encoding has come a long way.
I then realized that the headphones cost around $2000 (Audeze LCD-3) and a dac that I didn't recognize, but I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
But there were too many variables to tell what made the difference. Was it the expensive headphones + dac? Was it the better quality audio? Was it the different mastering of the song that I know?
Either way, I still listen to my "shit" audio setup because it's good enough for me and what I'm used too.
That usually means one of two things—
1. the frequency response of this new system is different, changing the relative loudness of different instruments;
2. the context caused you to concentrate on the music differently and your experience of it was therefore different.
The critical thing nobody ever says is "I heard things I never heard before, then I went back to my regular system and I stopped hearing the new thing." That never[0] happens—because the thing you hadn't noticed was there all along.
[0] Edit: Okay yes, so not never. I was assuming that the regular system is a reasonably competent modern setup. The median intentional audio system, shall we say.
...well, I have, but only when I was a child, and my “regular system” was a thing my parents bought for probably less than $20.
I own Stax, electrostats that make Audeze look plebian, plugged into their fancy Stax amp (although not the fanciest), plugged into a Theta DAC that is basically a 44.1/48khz Schiit Yggy, and there isn't some amazing leap.
Also, fun fact, want a 90% Audeze LCD clone? Monoprice M1070 and M1570. I have the predecessor, the M1060, fucking amazing for a $300 can, but flawed enough that I recommend the newer models of it.
I think for almost anyone who doesn't want to actively turn listening to music into a hobby, I think ~$100 each headphones and a DAC is the highest end anyone will ever notice.
But I can also believe that it is at least somewhat different for audiophiles. I once took a beer judge certification course, and, by the end of it, I could easily distinguish flavor subtleties that were completely imperceptible to me at the start of the class. Not just in a "I think I can" way, but reliably in blind tests. And I've had a similar experience of imperceptible differences becoming easy to spot when learning to speak new languages. So it seems possible to me that simply being an audiophile makes it possible to care about subtleties that non-audiophiles can't even hear, because brains are magical like that.
TL;DR: If I had 5,000 dollars to spend on high end audio equipment for my living room, I'd spend 3,500-4,000 on the speakers. But I wouldn't, personally. I'd spend half of that and get 98% of the quality.
For example you have the Japanese audiophiles spending 100,000 on speakers but live in a 10x10 room, or install power lines as they say they can hear the difference.
Audio reaches diminishing returns pretty quickly, you aren't going to see massive audio gains by upping your budget from $2,000 to $20,000 but you will by going from $200 to $2,000. At a certain point you are paying for a sound curve that suits you over the end all be all music reproduction.
A lot of stuff is getting cheaper too with good class D amplifiers with very low distortion being available to DIY and custom builders for relatively cheap (as long as you aren't in the class D is garbage audiophile crowd, which I think is similar to the my $1,000 dollar wire is better than your $50 dollar wires).
Xiph seems to agree: https://web.archive.org/web/20200124190800/https://people.xi...
Of course, when you look at these high resolution recordings, the amplitude of material above 20kHz is piddling. The amount of harmonics/overtones in acoustic instruments is minuscule in the first place.
https://i.imgur.com/ZgU1bgI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZpbyyI.jpg
Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.
Your analogy misunderstands audio signals. The resolution components of bit depth and lossy compression are different axes and should not be conflated with or analogised to frequency resolution. They behave very differently.
Here's an english copy of the test:
http://www.geocities.ws/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3t...
Amplifiers don't tend to matter much any more - cheap class B solid-state amps are all fine these days (heaphone amps are a lottery though).
Digital sources have largely sounded perfect for the past 20 years.
A properly set up pair of good speakers in a room big enough to let them do their thing can be an _astonishing_ thing to hear.
I used to be a earphones or nought when I was a kid, then I started using some "expensive" Sony headphones, had those almost a decade now but have since started using a combination of IEMs, monitor speakers and a pair of planar magnetic headphones with big drivers.
Even though I'm decades older than when I started, and in theory my hearing is worse, I hear things in music I've listened to for all of this time that I didn't before.
I have a high res audio player, I buy high res music and all that, but the single biggest difference I'd say is having a good size driver, 40mm+ for headphones, the ability to drive them well (a cheapish but not too cheap amp) and some decent quality music, ideally MP3 320 or something or lossless.
As someone who doesn't make music or content I wouldn't recommend monitor speakers for general listening unless you're a true purist, they don't sound "fun", they're extremely directional and I can only describe them as "clinical".
The same can be said for many IEMs, but not always.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans
"Old-fashioned" CD, when mastered with modern noise shaping, gets super-close to the fundamental limits of human hearing. Furthermore, as the above link points out, older people often can't hear above 15khz. Thus, if you're older, you might not be capable of hearing the difference between a CD and the same mix on BluRay or DVD.
FWIW: There's a lot of psuedoscience in the audiophile market. Things like DSD and sampling rates about 96khz make little sense outside of the recording studio. (This is because the absolute upper limit of human hearing is 28khz. 96khz exceeds the human hearing range by almost an octave.)
https://i.imgur.com/ZgU1bgI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZpbyyI.jpg
Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.
But going above 96khz or DSD is silly outside of the recording studio.
I did hear a difference, but it's not obvious. It's not a "OMG WHOA" when you put on the latest crisp FLAC compared to whatever streamed from Apple Music. On some tracks, the difference is nil. But on the occasional track, the hi-fi version is just clearer end-to-end. And on a few tracks, you will hear tiny little things you'd never heard before, and this can be actually exhilarating -- like, there will be a track I've listened to 100 times, and now suddenly I hear the bit of sticky-spit sound as the singer opens his mouth right before starting to sing... and that instantly makes it like you're standing right next to the microphone. Sounds silly, but it's cool.
Unfortunately they're just not comfortable enough to wear all day.
So day-to-day I use mmx 300's for everything else.
I did have to buy one of those "demonstration CDs" and test stuff out. I wonder how many people do that?
I think to even try, you need to set up an A/B system and precisely match levels. If you don't match levels, the louder one will always sound better.
I've tried it before, but it's hard to match levels. It's even harder if you're swapping headphones or earbuds.
I use the older one which uses the kernel from the stock firmware. To my understanding done by the guys who worked also on the original firmware. I have seen just a single issue, it's minor: fast forward/rewind does not work properly. It does forward/rewind, but slower than expected.
The new native port lists quite some downsides/TODO's, so I did not yet switch over.
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/XDuooX3
The Xudoo X20 should support Rockbox as well:
https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/XDuooX3ii
I forgot how much I liked using Rockbox, and I am so happy I can use it again.
Every few months i look up new options, but none of them has actual buttons or are WAY to expensive (ok to pay up to $3-400)
I can't use a touch device on a bike. I want F* buttons.
Any suggestions?
I'm a bit paranoid that WD (who now own Sandisk) will stop making them, leaving a gap in the market when stock empties out.
Recently I got a used single samsung galaxy bud, and have been using my phone. The touch controls on the earbud work through my fingered gloves. Wind noise is an issue though. I might try something like https://www.cat-ears.com to block the wind without making it hot.
Apple devices will always use AAC codec if I remember which is is not only compressed, but will also try to compress with lower bitrates than say a regular mp3 cbr compression by judging which parts of the audio signal can be compressed more heavily according to what we should be able to hear. I think apple devices do not support lossless bluetooth.
Android devices were known in the past to use a bitrate that is dependant on the amount of processing power the encoder gets assigned from the system. This means that on some phones with power management that is not designed with encoding for bluetooth in mind you would end up with horribly low bitrates because the power management would take away processing resources from the encoder to save battery. This of course would not apply to lossless codecs, if the sender and receiver support them both and the software picks it up correctly.
You are right though, iOS devices don’t support anything other than AAC or SBC over Bluetooth. MacOS devices do seem to additionally support AptX, but none of the low latency or lossless variants.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Apple planned to roll their own AAC lossless codec given the movement of Spotify to lossless streaming, leaving Apple with no high tier offering.
You can also use it on your desktop/laptop which may have outdated Bluetooth hardware as a transmitter to your modern Bluetooth headphones.
Also, thanks to a friend who was into whatcd, my entire entire CD collection was ripped in a great way. I moved abroad a few years ago and I'm thankful that I could donate the less rare ones to the local library and avoid shipping a bunch of boxes to my new place.
I still purchase the majority of albums I want from bandcamp and HDtracks and having a dedicated device that can take a profissional headphone is great for my study.
Love the build-quality, though. I've always regretted giving away my Sansa Fuze when I got my first smartphone, and at least microUSB is a standard instead of relying on Sansa's proprietary cables.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-M3-Pro-Resolution-Touchscreen/dp...
SMSL is another company like that, I highly recommend their class-D amplifiers - especially the ones based on ST[microelectronics] chips. The SA-50 (ST) sounds better than the SA-60 (TI) - I have both.
The best audio player is the one you have in your hand right now. (to butcher the quote) And that for me, just like my camera, is the phone that is always there.
Having said that Music, like coffee, or keyboards is a very personal thing that people connect with and so I can see the appeal of the focused device. It's similar to the e-book reader I suppose where there are not the distractions of a full connected phone. Just you and the music.
I've even gone as far as using my phone's OTG USB feature to hook up my amp as a DAC, which is admittedly awkward in my pocket. But to your point, I would miss my convenient streaming options.
A good compromise are amps that use a high quality bluetooth connections, like EarStudio.
It's been easy enough to replace the battery when it stopped holding charge. I'm dreading the day the player dies on me, as all its replacements seem to be moving against the design decisions that made this device so great for me.
just a sidenote: the sundara you mention have 37 ohm which is pretty standard and they should be easy to drive.
Although in a perfect world I'd just have an iPod with a headphone amp as good as the current Walkmans/Fiios.
That said, why is an audio player review from 2018 on the front page? o_O
> why is an audio player review from 2018 on the front page
It's the newest audio player with support for Rockbox firmware and FLAC. Pointers to better alternatives with Rockbox support would be appreciated.
They sell the ZX500 series currently, it runs android, is missing USB DAC functionality and has regional volume restrictions which completely gut the potency of the amplifier, and for which there is no known workaround currently as root has not yet been publicly obtained.
The only thing I’m not happy with is the volume limit (I have an EU machine). It doesn’t leave me any headroom on insensitive planar magnetic headphones like Fostex T50’s and Dan Clark Aeon’s. Worse than that, they limit the 4.4mm output to the same power output as the 3.5mm and have removed high/low gain completely in software in these systems
I want (which does exist) A classic, with a 2T drive, with a supersized battery (10x the original) and bluetooth. I'll probably have to wait another decade till my current one finally kicks the bucket though!
rockbox was a delightful experience, such a cool project.
Is it hackable/programmable? I need a short nice bell every n seconds.
If it can do both I'm buying...
A Hi-fi DAP (Digital Audio Player) should do one thing, and one thing well: play music to the best of it's ability. Admittedly, most of this is wasted because headphones are usually the weakest link. The general philosophy in audio is this: Music is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. That chain looks something like this: artist plays music, the music enters the venue it's being played in, then the combination of playing and the room are picked up by a microphone. The signal is amplified in the microphone, and sent to be recorded on a medium like digital or tape. Then the signal is replayed through a mixing board and the mixing engineer makes changes. The music is then put on a final medium, let's say digital for this day and age.
Ok, now there is a bit perfect recording. You just play it, right? Wrong.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_samp...
"establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth."
All the information is ENCODED, but DECODING is another story. I won't get into that here. Haters will say the ear can't hear anyway. Purists will say every deviation from "perfect" stacks, and the end result may be very audible.
So, the signal is converted to a waveform which then needs to be outputted as a series of electrical pulses resembling a staircase. Not all electronics are designed to do this well. More computation power can extract a more close representation of the "all the information" part of the Shannon-Nyquist sampling theorem. It's not just determining the steps to output, but outputting that electrical signal perfectly. Many things can interfere with this small electrical signal. Wifi in a DAP? Yep. Gonna interfere, turn it off when listening. Electrical noise from other internal components leaking back into the power supply and tainting the signal? You betcha. Every piece of hardware in a DAP is less than perfect and degrades the music. The screen, the processor, the ram, the wifi, etc.
After the signal is generated, it is now "Analog". Converting bits to an analogue signal is not an easy thing. After that the analog signal needs to be amplified in a linear way to no piece of the musical experience is exaggerated or lower key. Then there is the limitations of headphones.
DAPs are amazing technologies that act as stepping stones to the Hi-Fi world by disabusing people of the notion that bitperfect is good enough. It's not, music is only as good as the weakest link.
Fiio is the introduction, an entry level drug to the world of hi-fi.
Be careful. Hearing is believing