Digital Audio Players

The article I read is: Does anyone actually use digital audio players?

Short answer, yes - yes there are plenty of people that use digital audio players (DAPs).

You see, we DAP users tend to hide in our little alcove, hidden away from the rest of the world (unless you know where to look).

More seriously, it's true we are somewhat "far and few", but we do exist and we do buy DAPs. Most of us "hide" on audiophile sites like head-fi.org and go to expos like CanJam, but of course, some of us also don't.

I'll quit having fun now and actually rant about MP3 players (coughcoughiPodcoughcough) and DAPs.

If the article author is reading this, I'll inform you that my rants may be hard to follow (and I sometimes never write in chronological order).

Anyway, why DAPs? There's a lot of reasons people choose DAPs over their phones or Apple-branded devices - anywhere from file compatibility to quality of sound. For me, it was mainly because of storage and that I use Linux much more often than Windows; there's also the file compatibility, but I'll get there in a bit.

Originally, I had an iPod (I don't remember what generation, but I think it had an 80GB hard drive), and when it died, I replaced it with one that had 160GB. I think that one died and I replaced it with the "Classic" that had the 120GB hard drive. At some point after that, I grabbed the 64GB iPod Touch (4th generation).

It was fine, it held all of my music (though I reduced the bitrate to save a bit of space on the "iTouch" - what I call it when I'm too lazy to utilise proper nomenclature), and it shuffled all of my songs the way I liked it.

My friend told me about the ColorFi or something sometime before I purchased the iTouch and shoved it into one of my Amazon wishlists before it ended up getting deleted into eternity (became unavailable or something if I remember correctly). It was a very brief touch into the DAP world for me.

It was roughly September of last year when the iTouch began to glitch out much more often than used to, and October I decided on Cayin's Spark N5 DAP, which apparently had a slightly better firmware than Fiio's X5 II.

Roughly 256GB of music at maximum with two micro SD card slots? Hell yeah! No longer have to boot into Windows and wait forever and a half for iTunes to down-sample and sync my music? Hell fckin' yeah! Better sound quality? I'll take it.

I'm not an audiophile like others can be, and so it's not a huge deal to me.

Well, I forgot that with the ASUS ZenFone 2, I bought a 64GB micro SD card to load all of my music onto (without resampling) and attempted to utilise it as a music device, but it didn't work. Why? Because there isn't a good music application for Android (at the time) that allowed me to do the same thing as the iTouch. Google's Play Music application (or whatever they call it) couldn't handle adding 8000 something songs in the play queue, and all the others I tried weren't much better. I think I ended up using it to listen to a specific song, since I never liked disturbing the iTouch's random queue.

There was also something at some point that I wanted to go with an open source codec (Ogg Vorbis) with my entire music library, but since I couldn't use it with iTunes, I set the idea aside and passively pined to get away from the Apple.

Back to the near past, and the N5 was a pretty decent replacement for the ageing and glitchy iTouch, as the randomisation was okay. What I found was that after a week or two is that I would hear the same songs in the same order... I remember reading somewhere that a playlist on the N5 has a maximum capacity of 1000 for some sort of security issue or something, so I'm guessing it got stuck with some set of 1000 songs and randomised between them. It wasn't too bad though, I usually could skip one or two songs and it would be okay for another week or two.

What was the real problem with the N5 that I had? Electro-static discharge. ESD likes to make everything problematic for everything that isn't protected against it. What happened was that every-so-often, ESD would enter from somewhere and freeze the firmware and I'd have to scramble for the reset button or try some weird trick with the micro USB port and the power button to get it back on. Eventually I kept my SIM card ejection tool that came with my Nexus 5X with me, so when it did freeze, I could just whip it out and reset the thing. I could never pinpoint where it was entering from and understand how it affected it that badly. C'est la vie.

The other slightly annoying thing was that the headphone and line out was the same jack and that I had to change between them depending on what I wanted - I also had to fix this after a full reset. I eventually grabbed a short right angle adapter stereo cable to keep plugged into the port so I wouldn't lose my line out "volume" when I unplugged from my work speaker or from the car; when I wanted to listen with headphones, I just unplugged the adapter and plugged my headphones in (insert Staples button here).

Since the randomization was limited, I didn't care too much if it reset or meddling with it when I wanted to listen to a specific song, but even with "page scrolling" enabled, it  was impossible to get to a specific song while looking through a list of 8300 something songs.

But the main thing I loved about it was the hardware buttons (because the iTouch only has four buttons, none of which contribute to playback functions) because I didn't have to awkwardly try to find the next "button" on the touch screen while keeping my eyes on the road. Shame I realised late that holding the volume buttons on the N5 was the same as previous/next. C'est la vie.

It's probably obvious by my tense that I didn't stay with the N5 and I pre-ordered Fiio's X5 III on the last day of February this year. I finally got it mid-March and have been using it since then. Randomisation function seems to be much better than the N5, though the X5 III runs Android and Fiio's very own music application; however, because of the relatively frequent firmware updates (and also not thoroughly exploring all the options in the application), I've not been able to get a proper randomisation test in. Que sera sera.

From what I've been able to experience, I really love the X5 III. Roughly 512GB maximum storage size (because micro SD cards are maxed out at 256GB at the moment, but it will easily support higher cards when they're available), dedicated previous/next buttons, volume wheel (a bit more on this later), touchscreen, and ability to properly search for songs (albeit slow)? Let's say my reaction was somewhere between extreme hyperactivity and cardiac arrest.

Well, I forgot to say that when I was looking to replace the N5, I was heavily considering the X5 II, but while looking around for a confirmed maximum card capacity for it, I found out about the X5 III and read over Fiio's page on their site about it. Though companies usually try their best to glorify new products, I was quite sold because it was everything I was wanting and needing. (I think this was roughly January by the way.)

Anyway, the power button has a blue LED that indicates power and charge (though I don't think I've ever seen it not blue), which I read that a lot of people don't like, and I see why - it's bloody annoying. There're ways to deal with it, but I don't think Fiio can do anything with at the firmware level, since I'm sure they would've done so by now. Que sera sera.

The volume wheel is kinda nice, but sensitive (like all the other buttons), and also doesn't change volume quickly enough sometimes (which was another complaint I read about). Fiio might be able to fix this at the firmware level by adding a multiplier option so one wheel step changes the volume by x amount. I'm not too concerned with it, since most of the time I'm utilising the line out jack.

Which is what I forgot to add to the list above, headphone and line out are bloody separated! Line out shares the same jack as coaxial out, but who uses that stuff? Well, not me anyway, and obviously line out is the default option.

And as I said, the buttons are bloody sensitive, it's easy to accidentally press a button with or without the vinyl case (it also comes with a leather case, but I didn't care for it. I figured the easiest remedy would be to cut out the button overlays in the vinyl case, and yesterday I decided to do it because I was sick of having to turn the screen on every time for the playback controls. Forgot to say that the buttons and volume wheel can be locked out to avoid the accidental issue. Anyway, it worked pretty well, though I left the power button overlay alone since I thought it was okay (earlier today I decided to go ahead and get rid of it, just because).

If it's not obvious why I was ecstatic for the touchscreen, it's because I can utilise an on-screen keyboard to search for stuff. Though the stock, non-Google keyboard wasn't bad, I ended up installing Google's keyboard (Gboard I think it's called now?) since Google's keyboard gives me more access to accented characters (though I haven't really utilised them in searches yet), and that I was installing Google's Japanese keyboard anyway (might as well make everything match).

I did say the search is slow... It's kinda bad, I'll type like 3 characters and then have to wait for it pull up results. Live searches are good for certain things, but the X5 III can't handle it that well with a large library - I'd like to see them implement a way to turn off live search to make it quicker for users like me to search their music. While it is slow, that doesn't mean I have to stop pressing keys as soon as it lags, nope, I can keep typing and hope I don't make a mistake because that's when I would actually have to wait, unless I know what I hit. Search is perfect from what I tested as searching "fo(u)r" actually brings up the songs and nothing else while "four" doesn't bring any of those songs up. I tried a search for something in Japanese, but it was a unneeded reassurance.

The list of songs is weird and some accented characters don't appear right, but that's really not much of my concern (sadly it's actually faster to search than to scroll with the touchscreen).

Oh yeah, the X5 III also has WiFi and Bluetooth which I was initially excited for (mainly Bluetooth), but now it's a bit more inverted now. WiFi makes the firmware updates easy, since it's less to do than to download it, transfer it, etc. It does have an option for manual updates, but I doubt I'll need it. I was excited for the Bluetooth because Fiio has their own Bluetooth remote for Bluetooth-compatible devices, but the only time I would be using it would be in the car, but the buttons on the X5 III itself isn't hard to remember... I'll maybe pair it with the iTouch or something, we'll see.

My only minor irk with the X5 III is that with the ports on the bottom, the spot I've been using for the DAPs blocks access to two of the three playback buttons since I keep the stereo cable topside when in that little spot. I'll eventually adapt.

I did glitch out the Fiio music application while trying to play over Bluetooth to the Sound Step thing I have, while not important, it was still a sort of "well, there goes that idea..." situation. I'll just use my headphones.

Sound-wise, it seems like the N5 boosts the higher frequencies a bit while the X5 III sounds clearer and more balanced (both DAPs at default sound settings). I eventually got really tired of hearing the same song twice in a row trying to compare the two, and got really bored quickly.

X5 III also supports fast charging (9 and 12-volt charging), and I grabbed my ZenFone 2 charger when I was initially setting up the X5 III, since it would easily keep it charged than a 5-volt, 1-amp charger. It was really weird setting it up because I've gotten so used to it taking a day or two to set up a new (Android) smartphone, but it took me an hour or less and I felt extremely lost.

Oh yeah, there's no accelerometers, so no landscape keyboard for me. Que sera sera.

The X5 III is very slightly bigger than the N5 which was a nice find, though I didn't really care much. Neither of them are as small as the iTouch, but do realise that the iTouch has a smaller battery and less music-related components.

I'll stop reviewing the X5 III here as I kinda went in that direction (if you're still reading this, article-author, I first applaud you, and I secondly re-welcome you to my rants).

I remember something about the LG G6 (or whatever it is) was supposed to have quad-DACs (digital-analogue converter), but from the short digging I did after it was released, I couldn't find such thing. Would I have gotten it instead of the X5 III? Nope.

Anyway before I quit ranting altogether, let's take a brief (and late) introduction to what makes a DAP a DAP. Well, I suppose there's two ways to see this... DAP stands for Digital Audio Player, so in technicality lots of things are DAPs (phones, Apple products, etc), but what do we music enthusiasts and audiophiles consider a DAP? A unit that has good-quality DACs. I think most mid-range DAPs (X5 II, X5 III, N5, etc.) are dual-DACs, where one DAC takes care of one frequency range and the other takes care of the other frequency range. So by that definition, phones and all that stuff is taken off the list because they just have some cheap stuff that sounds decent.

As far as the two DAPs mention in the article, I probably wouldn't buy them mainly because the X5 III has a higher storage capacity capability. Well, considering I already have the X5 III, I don't see any good reason to spend more money for another DAP (considering I've already purchased two).

I did revisit the Ogg Vorbis idea, but decided it probably won't be worth the time for the moment, since that entails converting my entire library. When I build Melty's replacement (possibly an AM4+ CPU when those are out... or maybe AM5), I'll probably be a bit more willing to do so since it'd be a bit faster with multi-threading (along with multi-core processing). The main reason why I originally thought about doing it was because openSUSE doesn't ship with the MP3 codec because of it's non-free status, but after moving to Manjaro, I'm obviously not as worried about it. We'll see what happens later.

Anyway, for those of you who are avid (?) and/or regular readers, you now know a decent amount of my history with portable music players, and for the article-author (again, if you're still here), you now have quite a bit of insight to why people like us prefer DAPs over anything else (even if it is another device to carry).

Also, I was going to write/rant couple days ago when I read the article, but it's difficult to do anything at all when dizziness prevails... Yay, illnesses! (Yay, sarcasm!)

Well, back to the blog's semi-hiatus... Ciao!