I was reading up on early impressions of the R7 last night it does sound like an interesting device but I feel the screen looks odd and it’s no looker. But the price and the features and if it sounds as good as the M11 Plus it’s a winner. T
I was considering replacing my current setup in my home office by getting some actives and using the M11 as a source. I need speakers as well as phones and a way to get my work computer to output, so I think this would work better and it would prolong the M11 battery life. The speakers they are releasing look a bit too small for me as I need them on stands.
Will wait and see though until some proper reviews are in and it’s been out for a while to judge reliability being their first foray into this area. I am also interested in their cans to but not see anything on those yet.
I don’t know Cassandra Jenkins at all, @Simon_Arnold3. I just listened to that song - it’s a stop what you’re doing and pay attention song. Really lovely.
On the R7. Maybe you know the story of how Jeff Hawkins designed the original Palm Pilot. The story is that he created and carried a block of wood around that was shaped like the device they were trying to create. He interacted with the block of wood as if it were the actual Pilot - he’d click buttons, write in Graffiti, carry out actual tasks. It won’t surprise me if any of you know this story - it’s a tale often told by product designers.
The R7 is failing my block of wood test. I’ve been imagining it sitting on my desk. Its dimensions are awkward and I see myself getting irritated that I have to actually do things on that little screen. It seems that there are just two ways the screen plays out - a) it’s necessary and you interact with it a bunch or b) it’s useless and it doesn’t actually need to be there. Neither of those is a good thing.
It’s a really interesting device and it’s a ton of value for the price. I imagine it will make sense for a lot of people including people who don’t use Roon. I don’t think it makes sense for me, though.
Give the album ago its superb best lockdown album for me, also her first is really good to. What would you need to do on the screen though? Roon is all remote a few things to switch gain. They have said they are looking at a remote app for it so that stuff will not be an issue if/when they do.
She reminds me of Suzanne Vega. Also vaguely of claire rousay.
There are at least a couple of things you’d need to do on the R7 screen. Launch the FiiO Roon app, adjust between the 5(!) gain modes. If that’s it, though, then why buy a device with a touch screen and open Android?
The R7 makes sense for a user who wants to install and interact with a variety of music apps. That’s not me - I’m 100% Roon. If you flipped the R7 into a landscape orientation and either put a non-touch display on it (like the Atom) or dropped the display altogether and had it do automatic input switching, I’d be more likely to be a customer. The price point and the features are great - I just don’t think I need a vertical box with Android on my desk.
So how do you select the FIIO M11 to be the playback device. I started roon ready which opens a player screen that does not do anything. I am trying to get the M11 setup to play remote in the vehicle over internet. I can’t find a good tutorial or detailed instruction anywhere. If I can’t figure this out in the next 13 days going to have to cancel my trial.
Roon ARC works over the internet. Roon Ready devices don’t. It’s a complicated distinction.
When you run the FiiO Roon app on the M11, it becomes a Roon Ready endpoint. When it’s in this state, and on the same local area network as a Roon core, the core will detect it. The Roon controller apps on Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone, Android have a settings page called “Audio”. When a device is detected by the core, it will show up in that Settings > Audio page at which point you can “Enable” it. Once you’ve done that, you can use the Roon apps to play music to that device on the LAN. Both the controller and the device must be on the LAN.
If you want to play something from outside of your LAN, you can run ARC on the playback device. ARC will connect to your home-based core over the internet.
You can install and use the ARC app on your M11. Here’s a summary of the three apps you can run on your M11:
FiiO Roon. Included on the device. Run this (on your home network) to put the M11 into the Roon Ready state. When in this state, you can use any Roon controller to play music to your M11.
Roon Remote. Installable from the App Store. Use this app (on your home network) to control any Roon playable zone including the M11. To control the M11, you must also be running FiiO Roon.
ARC. Installable from the App Store. Use this app to play music on the M11 when you are outside of your home network but have connectivity through a mobile hotspot or some other WiFi network.
As much as you can with the built-in DAC on any Android device.
You can set ARC to play full resolution. The issue is that ARC doesn’t understand DAC resolution on Android very well. In practice, this means that ARC essentially takes a look at the DAC frequency at the moment it is launched and then up or downsamples everything to that frequency.
If you boot the M11 and run ARC before doing anything else, it’ll see the default frequency and play to that. My recollection is that the default frequency is 384kHz. I might be wrong about that, but it’s something. So as you move from track to track, everything will be up or downsampled to that frequency.
If you play something in another app before launching ARC, and that app sets the frequency of the DAC, then ARC will see that frequency upon launch. It will up or downsample to that frequency.
So bitperfect is always possible, with some work, but isn’t necessarily convenient and won’t be maintained if you have a playlist with tracks at different frequencies.
There’s a rumor that Roon is working on getting ARC to do what we would consider bitperfect. There’s no timeline or commitment to this, as far as I know.
My personal strategy is to keep a set of tracks around that I can use to get the DAC into the state I want it at before launching ARC. I have a set of short, silent tracks at different frequencies. I use the FiiO Music app to play them.
Tried what you said and have it operating. I tried to listen to Nora Jones 192khz track, when it arrives from the Core at the M11 over ARC it is being downsampled to 48khz. Path also show blue lights on everything but the sample rate conversion and the output “AAudio” which are both green. Am I missing something else?
Just tried that and it did exactly as you said, thanks. So they are trying to get this fixed in ARC? Definitely would be truly a plus if you didn’t have to go through this process. Also the output was the only thing remaining green lit. Is there anything other that “AAndroid” output thats higher quality than this?
So just did a back to back test with several Nora Jones HiRes tracks Qobuz vrs ARC in my vehicle. Set the M11 to the 192khz track as described above. Played the track with ARC and I am getting noise in the audio stream, occasional clicks. Shut everything down and started it up again this time allowing the resampling to do its own thing which it down sampled to 48khz, still got the clicking with the ARC app. shut all of that down and jumped back to the Qobuz player and played the same track, dead silent no clicks. I tried this on several HiRes tracks and got the same result everytime. Either I have something set wrong in ARC or the stream directly from QoBuz is cleaner than what I am getting from the CORE over ARC. I am using the Digital Coax SPDIF output of the M11 into my Helix DSP Ultra.
I don’t mean to imply that. I don’t have any inside information - there have been some rumors which I assume are based on private comments from Roon employees to users. To my knowledge, no Roon employee has made comments or commitments. If this factors into a subscription decision for you, please don’t base your decision on anything I’ve said.
I don’t believe so on the M11 due to FiiO’s implementation of the audio stack. The same thing is not necessarily true on other Android devices.
I don’t know exactly why you’re seeing that. With ARC, content will stream down to your core and then up and out of your home to your phone. This means that you have a 192kHz data stream going into your home and a 192kHz stream coming out of your home at whatever sampling frequency that track is at. Perhaps you’re getting dropouts. You might try setting ARC to “Automatically pick best quality” to determine if perhaps it’s a bandwidth issue. Hope you figure it out.
They are all the same, Roon defaults to AAudio for any android device. Only doesn’t when using a USB DAC or they have the Roon SDK installed like Fiio Roon and A&K do.
No there isn’t currently. Arc will only output bitperfect using USB dacs currently which is a newish addition. They hope at some point to support internal dacs in DAPs and phones.
Good information but this clicking noise issue in the audio may be a deal breaker for me. On 5G and definitely not having dropouts in the incoming audio stream.
It’s not just the mobile 5G network that’s involved in ARC - it’s your home network and your ISP. But that’s just one possibility. There’s a lot going on in your setup. If you’re invested in this, you’d need to start reducing variables. Change the ARC download setting, try headphones (eliminate the coax connection and the DAC), try lower resolution tracks. Anything I suggest is just throwing darts at the wall
