FiiO K17 R2R Pro

Audio Gear Talk FiiO
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After sitting on the fence for several weeks I finally decided to take advantage of the Roon store offer of a FiiO K17 R2R Pro along with a free year of Roon. Well the K17 R2R arrived today and since I am using the unit as a headphone amp for playing Roon, the setup was quite easy: the power cord and a EtherNet cable. Very simple.

Once I set the K17 R2R’s operating mode to “streaming” the K17 R2R showed up in Roon under the Setting → Audio → Roon Ready and I enabled the K17 R2R. Once again, very simple and straight forward.

As the owner of several other FiiO products (see the picture below) I’m somewhat familiar with FiiO’s menus and so with a little bit of fiddling I have the K17 R2R setup to my liking. The K17 R2R has many features which, being a Roon user, I will most likely never use, such as a built-in parametric equalizer (I use Roon’s Muse feature for EQing) and local file playback. At the moment I have the K17 R2R set to streaming mode with non-oversampling on and the equalizer off. There are five gain settings (low, medium, high, super high and ultra high) and so far I haven’t needed more than the high gain setting.

Okay then but how does the K17 R2R sound? Well it’s a little bit early for me to make any informed judgement but so far it sounds very, very good. Very detailed as well as very smooth, which is what I’ve come to expect from R2R DACs. I will update my sonic impressions of the K17 R2R in a few weeks.

As for the picture below here is a what is shown.

On the left side of the photo towards the back is the FiiO R9 with the tiny S.M.S.L M20 DAC/headphone amp sitting on top.

On the rack:

Bottom shelf: Benchmark DAC3 HCG (which I use as preamp and headphone amp)

Next shelf up are two FiiO SR11 streamers and sitting on top of them are two Pro-Ject StreamBox S2 Ultras

Middle shelf is the FiiO K13 R2R DAC/headphone amp along with the Jeep.

Fourth shelf up has the Fiio Darkside Pro Power Supply (used to power the K13) with the FiiO K11 R2R DAC/headphone amp sitting on top. I’ve been using the K11 as the headphone amp for playing back audio on my desktop computer.

A finally on the top shelf is the FiiO K17 R2R Pro with those very stylish wooden side panels.

And of course to help stabilize the units and provide that little extra something to the sound of all these units there are two Grogu figurines sitting at the top. One can be seem on top of the S.M.S.L M20, the other is sitting on top of the K17 R2R.

FiiO K17
FiiO K171920×2560 788 KB

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Have also just bought and started using a FiiO R2R with Roon.

Am also finding its sound excellent: rich, deep yet faithfully detailed.

One small tip, if I may: the USB cable that came with mine was USB-A to USB-C. To connect the rear port to my Mac Studio it needs to have USB-C at both ends.

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So you are using the K17 for playing Roon via Ethernet or Wifi and for playing audio from your Mac Studio via the USB input? Please correct me if I got something wrong.

I may try using the line out of K17 (using the K17 as a preamp) to go the speaker system in the room. As I stated in my original post, I’m currently using the Benchmark as the preamp because it sounds fantastic, so it will a good test of the K17 to put it up against the Benchmark. The speakers are B&W 805 D2 stand mounted bookshelf and an Energy MS-12.1 powered subwoofer. The amp is an Aragon 4004

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I’m streaming from Roon via ethernet.

But because the FiiO is so versatile and so reliable, I’ve also set it up to output sound from my Mac studio to my ParaSound stereo system. And headphones. That uses USB. So I can listen to podcasts and YT output etc with the same endpoints as work with Roon, which also sees the K17 as a Roon-ready endpoint, of course.

I guess it’s also serving as a very simple but sonically excellent ‘controller’ which routes from the two sources on my computer two both my pre-amp using balanced XLR, and the headphones.

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This morning I managed to connect the K17 R2R into my audio system as a preamp (using the single ended outputs, as is the case with the Benchmark) and unsurprisingly it sounded great. Will the K17 R2R replace my trusty and much loved Benchmark DAC3 HGC? Probably not but it’s good to know that the K17 R2R would make a great preamp.

The K17 R2R has two analog inputs: one single ended (RCA) and one balanced (stereo 4.4mm jack). There are also USB, optical and coax digital inputs plus streaming (Roon Ready endpoint), all which make the K17 R2R a very capable hub for an audio system.

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