Sound signature of the FiiO R7
Contents
A review is usually about how it sounds. This review is more about what you can do with the R7 and whether this FiiO brings what you are looking for in an affordable, yet powerful solution. The sound signature is consistent and high quality, no matter how you use the player.
This player sounds transparent, its signature is that it sounds light and open. The highs are clear, but certainly not fresh or clinical. Being open means that you can follow with ease what is happening in the music you are listening to. There is space between the instruments, so the sound does not enter your ears as a lump of clay. The space given to the music to breathe is pleasant, it is certainly not analytical.
The DAC is fast and accurate, the fast drumming of Ojos de Brujo is handled without any problems and the music still breathes in the lightning-fast interactions between percussion, bass guitar and guitar. The sound is on the dry side, which means you hear little acoustics or after-tone. This adds to the transparent character, but it has to be your taste in sound reproduction.
Your reviewer never found listening to the R7 tiring. The transparent character remains on the friendly side and long listening sessions are not a problem. Different levels of amplification (‘gain’) can be chosen in the software to tune the player to the sensitivity of any headphones or powered speaker in use.
The ears don’t lie: there’s power and there’s power
On the hardware side, FiiO has thought of an upgrade option. A power cable is included, but the FiiO can also be powered with a 12-volt adapter. FiiO offers a matching linear power supply, to be purchased separately. This was not included with a review sample, so we were unable to test it. Connecting a 12Volt iFi iPowerX is possible as well, and that yielded a clear jump in sound quality. A linear power supply was not missing, the iPowerX seems to be an ideal match for this R7.
I am using the R7 with a Synology NAS running Emby server (https://emby.media/), works flawlessly and the Android app is very easy to use. The Fiio Music App is basically unusable.