Products We Love

I might as well restart Team Squeaky Clean. I just got up and running with that this week, and it's working great so far. Its work in Queen's Night at the Opera was nothing short of a miracle.
I'm using it with a Milwaukee cordless shop vac and a homemade cleaning solution consisting of 250mL isopropyl alcohol, 750mL distilled water, and 2 drops of Triton X-100.
Now I need to figure out what solution to use for my one shellac record. Maybe just water?
 
For anyone with an interest in lossless portable audio players, I absolutely adore the FiiO X7 Mark II. I'm a bit of a FiiO fan and have bought/tested several of their products over the past decade or so, but this is by far my favorite... 64gb internal storage and you can add 2 micro sd cards (the site states up to 256gb each but they often update firmware on their devices to handle newer micro sd cards as they come out so that could theoretically grow). It's got both standard and balanced headphone jacks and will play pretty much any audio format you throw at it. It has wifi and will work with Spotify and such, but imo that's just easier on a phone 🙃
 
For anyone with an interest in lossless portable audio players, I absolutely adore the FiiO X7 Mark II. I'm a bit of a FiiO fan and have bought/tested several of their products over the past decade or so, but this is by far my favorite... 64gb internal storage and you can add 2 micro sd cards (the site states up to 256gb each but they often update firmware on their devices to handle newer micro sd cards as they come out so that could theoretically grow). It's got both standard and balanced headphone jacks and will play pretty much any audio format you throw at it. It has wifi and will work with Spotify and such, but imo that's just easier on a phone 🙃

Outside of the balanced headphone jack what advantage does this thing offer over just loading up a ~1TB SD Card on an android phone with PowerAMP or say foobar2k? I am assuming the built-in amplifier?
 
Outside of the balanced headphone jack what advantage does this thing offer over just loading up a ~1TB SD Card on an android phone with PowerAMP or say foobar2k? I am assuming the built-in amplifier?

1TB SD card? Wow I've been out of touch :-D I need to get some larger cards to see if this thing can handle them then! I got this when I didn't have a smart phone, which I imagine for most have replaced audio players entirely... I've heard arguments that android phones aren't capable of truly lossless playback, but I can't say I back that argument as I don't suspect I have anything near "audiophile" level hearing. I will say I quite enjoy the balanced headphone jack and amp, but I do suppose newer phones are making things like this less than necessary. :)
 
Outside of the balanced headphone jack what advantage does this thing offer over just loading up a ~1TB SD Card on an android phone with PowerAMP or say foobar2k? I am assuming the built-in amplifier?
Without digging too far into specific models, I'm going to take an educated guess. I'd expect the biggest differentiation to be the DAC. The next possible biggest difference could possibly be the headphone amp. Another advantage to dedicated players is the battery. Many portable players have batteries near the same size as a cell phone, but without needing GPS, cell service, apps in the background, etc etc, that battery should go a LONG way.

Now if these things matter to you... well that's a different discussion. I'd imagine listening environments and headphones would play a major role in the decision.
 
Outside of the balanced headphone jack what advantage does this thing offer over just loading up a ~1TB SD Card on an android phone with PowerAMP or say foobar2k? I am assuming the built-in amplifier?
I have an older fiio and from what I understand the DAC is way better plus battery life was better since as others have said you don’t have other services on it. The form factor was also way smaller on mine than a phone. I used mine a lot for traveling. I’m also an iPhone user so carrying around another phone was not something I wanted to do. The UI on mine was bad but I think they have upgraded quite a lot on the newer fiios.
 
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