hogger how responsive are the controls to the time index on the X1? I find that super important. I like to be able to easily re-play the last few seconds. I am willing to pay for a scroll wheel if it can be used to easily replay music. That alone would get me to buy it. My midsized ipod finally died after many thousands of hours of use. I only have a small one that has the wheel. I have two midsized ipods without the wheel. They are fine for music since I normally play large play lists and maybe a few times a year will I actually play a single tune. My navigational needs are minimal when I listen to music. That is great since the new controls suck! They are terrible for audio books. As for 24 bit files... Our hearing is probably the least accurate and least reliable of our senses. Here is a link I like that addresses this short coming. Acustic Myth Workshop It is in the top sticky. This explains why persons can tell the difference between audios they really can't. Our mind plays tricks on us. We hear what we want to hear. Blind tests are the only true tests. One of the more amazing things I learned about psychoacoustic engineering is if your brain thinks it knows what note comes next it doesn't waste energy getting that note from your ear you just hear than note. How that actually works is way over my understanding. I can't understand why our minds would know what is next but apparently is can be expressed in an algorithm. What I gathered is just how sloppy our hearing is. It is primarily a warning system to sense danger coming from behind or in the dark. It lacks the precision of our vision which is our primary source of information.
I'm not sure I entirely understand what you mean by "to the time index on the X1." I found the controls to be very responsive such as when scrolling through songs. I know that you can adjust the player settings to resume where you left off when you last shut off the device. To fast forward/rewind through songs, you have to press and hold the lower left or lower right button. The only thing I don't like about the Fiio players is you have to update the library in the player settings when you add some songs. This can take anywhere from a couple of seconds to a few minutes depending on how many songs you have. I have ~5,000 songs on mine and it takes ~3 minutes for it to update the library. I tried this test around a year ago. I downloaded the free HDtracks sampler which has some 24/96 and 24/192 tracks. I downsampled these in foobar2000 to 16/48 FLAC files and did some blind testing to see if I could pick out any differences. And I was not able to. This makes sense too since the height of human hearing is around 20khz. I think the last time I actually tried to see the highest frequencies I could hear, it was somewhere like 18 or 19khz. The only benefit I can see in buying 24-bit files is if something is mastered differently than what is available on CD or Amazon/Google/iTunes.
I will need to buy one. The rewind sounds more workable than the newer ipods. That is not important for music but is valuable for an audio book when you miss something because of a distraction. Unless the tone is really loud a 30 something can't even hear 15 kHz. 24 bit preserves more detail from the analog. Again the 16 bit preserves more than you can hear just like 20 kHz is overkill. The Acoustic Myth resolves these issues giving real world examples. In brief, massive overkill is used not because it is needed or that it can be heard but because they can. Professionals ought to produce the highest quality they can even if it is massive overkill. The mistake is believing that you can hear a difference. Only the very young can hear 20 kHz if it is loud enough. Toddlers hear 20 kHz. Since they are human, 20 kHz is the limit of human hearing. That does not mean all humans can hear 20 kHz. We continue to lose the high end as we live. There is a technology that relies on the fact only teenagers can hear 17 kHz. There are mosquito ring tones which are 17 kHz. The kids in a HS class can hear the ring tone but the teacher can't even if the teacher is young. By college, the students lose that ability.
I found out that the Fiio X1 does not support Opus. I posted in their forum asking if it would be added and it sounds like a no-go. I found that odd since Opus is all open-source just like FLAC, but Fiio will not add support into the firmware. But ehh, I guess I'm fine using AAC files or FLAC files on mine.
