@darlicious wrote:
Can someone explain the difference between these two models and exactly what they do to improve playback or streaming music quality to make them worth buying ? ( Rather than using your phone or tablet.) Are they an improvement over an iPod? Thx
https://www.londondrugs.com/fiio-high-resolution-lossless-audio-player---black---m7/L0304795.html?cg...
https://www.londondrugs.com/fiio-portable-high-resolution-lossless-audio-player---m3k/M0006937.html?...
Audio/music - as stored on CDs and such - can be encoded in uncompressed digital formats. But these take up a lot of digital storage space (a typical audio CD is about 650MB for about a dozen songs), so they're usually compressed.
"Lossy" compression formats lose some quality. They each use different approaches and different tradeoffs - usually the very low and very high sound frequencies are lost, stray notes or beats are lost when forcing a mathematical "best fit" pattern onto the data, some digital artifacts create weird "tinny" or "chirpy" and "squishy" sounds, the music gets "flattened" into something less organic, etc. The rule of thumb is that the more aggressive the compression the smaller the file size (which means more songs in storage) ... but the more noticeable the degradation in fidelity.
"Lossless" compression formats are all about reproducing bit-perfect audio data after compression and uncompression. They either don't compress file sizes as small as the lossy methods or they require a lot of processing power to uncompress during realtime playback.
Audiophiles disdain lossy compression. True audiophiles disdain digital audio altogether, since it's already not analog, it's already lost pure fidelity.
But in the real world we're not all audiophiles. Few of us have consciously trained ourselves to hear fine details the way an audiophile would (a professional musician or sound engineer, etc). So we're okay with digitized CD-quality audio (44kHz/16-bit) and we can't even hear the difference in digitized high-quality audio (192kHz/24-bit) without listening carefully, without expensive speakers and hardware.
(A technical note most people ignore: human hearing can discern a frequency range of about <10Hz to about 18KHz-20KHz, maximum, and CD quality adds about 10% to this, then doubles it, then doubles it again for stereo, then encodes at 16-bit which allows an amplitude resolution of 65535 possible increments ... it's already considered better than human hearing thresholds by many people.)
(Another technical note most people ignore: almost everything played on electronic instruments, almost everything recorded on digital equipment - on a computer, in a studio, on a sound engineering board - is done with hardware rated for CD quality 44/16. You can play it back as perfectly as you like on whatever analog audiophile expensiveness you like but it's still been limited to the lowest order of quality anywhere between the performance and the listener.)
The ($270) FiiO M7 vs the ($100) FiiO M3K ...
They both can play all the common lossy audio formats.
The M7 can play lossless audio formats. The M3K cannot.
The M7 is equipped with ES9018 audio codec (the same 192KHz/24-bit chip used in high-end gaming motherboards and soundcards). It has a powerful tiny Samsung ARM processor.
The M3K is equipped with a lesser audio codec chip and an el cheapo processor (which "only" boasts an impressive 5Hz to 90KHz frequency range).
Both devices can use microSD storage. The M7 also has 2GB internal storage (about 2000 MP3 songs).
Both devices can output audio across USB or wireless. The M7 also has a 3.5mm headphone jack with a few basic built-in amplifier components.
The M3K isn't running as much tech so it does have better battery life.
The M7 is certainly better audio quality than any smartphone (including any Galaxy or any iPhone, regardless what their marketing and brand champions may claim) because it's a hefty little device purpose-built for nothing but top-quality audio processing.
The M3K is probably better audio specs than low-end or mid-end smartphones, probably not as good as high-end smartphones. The few phones with superior audio codecs usually proudly advertise themselves as somehow being made for awesome music listening.
Consider the headphones or speakers you'll use to listen to your music. If they're not high-end audiophile sorts of tech then the advantages of pure lossless audio will be wasted. Good luck finding any 3.5mm earbud-style headphones which deliver a true audiophile-quality experience.
And consider the music itself. If it's uncompressed (RAW, WAV, PCM, etc) or it's lossless (APE, FLAC, etc) then it'll benefit from the M7. But if it's typical lossy stuff (MP3, WMA, AAC, OGG, etc) or it's ripped off CDs (from CD-quality 44KHz/16-bit) then the extra oomph in the M7 will be wasted.
