School girl tech

Every modern young lady I ever met had some interest in music  whither or not it was just about the look and fashion of the artists, just singing the songs and usually some way of playing our favourite music.

Obviously with changing times, what it is we have changes as some products come to the end of their lives and others replace them and so while I was infatuated at one time with reels of tape, also I was an early adopter of the Japanese craze of the MiniDisc although that technology has come to something of a dead end with the discontinuing of recorders.

I have had personal digital audio players using either downloaded albums or home made copies, not least the Sandisk Clip Zip and a few Fiio models that offered better ergonomics and better sound but the current drive towards everything being Andriod based with swiping action is difficult for some of us with limited dexterity.

But I did need the ability to have bigger capacity cards and be free from the 5,800 song limit for indexing of older players.

Enter the Fiio X5 Mark II.

It's a digital audio player for sure but it is designed from the ground up to sound really good starting with using the same chip to convert the zeroes and ones of digital to analogue sound  as a £400 separate cd player and a very high quality headphone stage that cures at the outset the problem of not enough of and the failure to reproduce fully, the sound even from iTunes or better quality Mp3 albums.

Then there is the fact it also plays not only regular 16 bit lossless (Flac) downloads and home copied files equalling the full quality of a cd, it plays 24 bit better than cd ones too (192/24 being its limit) and it sounds on headphones better than many separates.

Critically it takes two cards that can be indexed together so two 128 gb cards can be indexed which helps with lossless files as to get the better sound they give, they do use more space per individual track.

In the UK you can by cd and better than cd  quality downloads from Presto who do Classical music and 7Digital as well as the French Qobuz company for much else like rock and pop.

Generally I tend to compile cards by genre finding it easier to find the recordings I want that way helping with swapping out - I keep mine in a single plastic pouch per card with the title on a sticky label inside a wallet folder.

The kicker though is it for once has a proper line level output just like a cd player rather than relying on a crummy headphone stage with its built in restrictions, so armed with lossless files it sounds equal to or actually better than a dedicated cd player.

It also has a coaxial digital output so you could use it as a sd card transport to a dedicated hifi digital to analogue convertor too.

Throw in the ability to play from a charger while charging and you too can be listening in really high quality to all those files while being portable enough to carry around with you.

This will work as much as the M21 is the better bet with 24 bit classical downloads for it's massive 2tb capacity.

Dept of strange affairs!

It's not uncommon for me to get new records and recently I have got a few classical records after a good twenty five or so years of just getting cds that I have played.

Schroeder's sentiments in this classic Peanuts frame below do rather match my own to be honest.

Yesterday had it's own moments too. Like as some of you know I have much of my music stored on micro sd cards for my music player for use out and about or  I'm poorly which isn't exactly uncommon with me, to play via it to a small stereo in my rest room.

It saves faffing about finding the recording and putting it on a cd or turntable when I'm feeling seriously yukky.

Anyway I like the awesome Canadian group Rush, always did and had been getting the new better than regular cd High Definition downloads  my player plays extremely well and I keep a spare card with back ups of them on.

Imagine then my reaction when while changing a card and it flies through mid air and I can't see it landed!

I was tearing my hair out trying to find it last night and have only just spotted it at the very end of the room in a dark corner just visible by it's gold plated contacts where it had landed contact side up!

I can see I'm gonna have to get a changing bag to put the player in while I'm doing this so it can't travel as far!

Now just listening to Stravinsky's The Firebird Suite as I type this!