ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
I see many posts lately about the trouble people have going from the Apple world to the BS5. I was in an opposite situation - how to take my BS5 music into the portable world. After 10 years, my trusty BS2 has finally ended it's useful life - it still works fine, but part of the charging plate broke off and I may be able to fix it with a small amount of glue, but, hey, maybe it's time to move along...
So, I went looking for a portable audio player that could support WMA lossless (so I no longer had to keep 2 versions of the song - one on the BS5, the other for my portable - this two copy approach made sense when 1GB SD cards were $100, today, not so much) and did not require iTunes (since I have managed my music for 10 years without), and I couldn't find anything mainstream. The MS Zune was an obvious choice, but it is no longer being manufactured (and while you can still find these, why start with a 5 year old player). Current MS windows phone offerings don't support it. I looked at "Rockboxing" an iPod classic, but it only supported WMA, not WMA lossless (and here's an angry rant to MS - why do I have to read the fine print and search internet forums to see that WMA lossless is not supported when something says it supports WMA). I was considering converting my BS5 music to FLAC (I already had some FLAC files from LPs I recorded using a Mac), but this was not fun so I kept looking... and found a "Fiio X3".
This is a very nice little device. It supports WMA lossless, Flac, Apple lossless, MP3, ACC (all the formats that one might have collected over 10 years without iTunes limiting ones choices), etc. , and doesn't cost a fortune. It sounds amazing. It was a little fiddly to get setup, and the ergonomics are a bit odd, but it seems solidly built and does what I need it to do. Very happy with this device so far. Sounds great with my H3s, and is powerful enough to effective drive the H6s, and can also be used as an outboard DAC (stream digital from computer via UBS). Happy New Year to me. :)
Stan