I don’t know if anyone will be interested in this, but thought I would toss it out.

I spend a good amount of time traveling for work during the fall/winter and during the Spring/Summer months, I spend a lot of time outdoors – particularly on beaches because I sail a beach catamaran.  As such, I am into mobile audio.

For years I have used iPods and DIY boomboxes.  I have also used iPod line out cords with headphone amps to give the music a little more quality and umph.

I have schemed about how I could run one of my digital transports via battery in order to use a battery powered DAC with my outdoor rig, but never done anything about it.  I’ve also lusted over some portable amp/dac combos on the market for a while, but they have been fairly expensive.

So while looking for a lower cost/higher SQ solution, I recently stumbled across the Fiio line of digital audio players (DAPs).  There are other brands, but I have used their headphone amps in the past and they seemed to have a good cost/value ratio.

For $200 I got their X3 second generation unit.   http://www.fiio.net/en/products/39

It looks like an old generation 1 iPod but it has some decent internals.  It uses the Cirrus Logic 4398 dac chip.  I think this is the same chip in the Teac 501 DAC Steve was running for a while.  It also has dual crystal oscillators, good op amp, etc.  All the music is stored on a micro SD card up to 128 gb.  Some have suggested this may be expanded later via firmware when higher capacity cards come out.

Unlike an iPod, it plays most formats (FLAC, APE, AIFF, MP3, etc.) up to 24/96 plus plays DSD 64/128 natively.  It also decodes .iso SACD files on the fly.  

Yes, it sounds solid state, but pretty decent solid state and I haven’t felt the fatigue I get when listening on headphones/earbuds that I get with the iPod.  It has enough output that I don’t need a headphone amp plus it has a high gain setting that is great for when I really want more volume out of my boombox.

It has a line out to connect to an amp (like my boombox) or headphone amp and SPDIF out if you want to port it to an external DAC.  Finally, it’s also a standalone USB DAC.

I haven’t used it as a USB DAC yet, but I did run SPDIF out of the X3 into my Chord DAC to play some DSD files on my Decware rig last night.  Sounded fine.   Soundstage seeming smaller was about my only nit.

So I have gained better SQ, tons more format options than iPods support, SPDIF out and a portable USB DAC while I have given up the refined iPod UI and the iTunes integration (which I could never use for hi res files on the iPod anyway).

If you are in to mobile music, these DAPs relatively cheap, offer decent SQ, are flexible and worth checking out.

Well it doesn't go on the water with me. But I do watch like a hawk if it loos like rain.