Review of the xDuoo X3 audio player: keep up, beautiful marquise – all good, all good..

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or think about yourself, picking up something anti-crisis in the field of player building. There’s a model – the xDuo X3! The device has the dimensions of an inch, paired with an ascetic menu, the appearance – “nothing too much,” good stuffing and a reasonable price. This sub clearly beats any mainstream device such as ipod, iphone and the more so various players from texet, Ritmix, Cowon and Sony. Although, the latter have decent models, but there and the price tag will be higher, and the mainstream they are not very much call..

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Thanks to XChesser Audio for the sample for listening

xDuoo X3 audio player

This is the second portable audio player from xDuo that I’ve had to listen to in the last year. The first is xDuo X2, but our acquaintance was too fleeting and breezy to make a deep impression of what we heard. And here is the expected novelty in my hands – the senior model xDuo X3.

I’m usually skeptical of these little inches – well, what can you do with it? But this time I was intrigued: how did the manufacturer managed to contain in such a small box the board based on DAC chip CS4398, amplifier with OPA1612 + LMH6643 and two microSD slots. The battery life is claimed to be about eight hours! Well, I think we need to get acquainted with such a miracle by all means.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Built-in memory No

Ingenic JZ4760B processor

DAC CS4398

Amplifier OPA1612 + LMH6643

Output power 250 mW @ 32&Omega

Battery 1500 mAh, up to 8 hours

OLED 1 display.3″

Supported audio formats DSD64, DSF, DFF, APE, FLAC, WAV, ALAC, CUE, WMA, MPE, AAC, OGG, AIFF

Memory cards 2 microSD slots

Dimensions 105×45×14 mm

Weight 100g

Appearance and package

The device is delivered in a black and white cardboard box with a picture of the player and technical specifications. Under the wrapping is a black hard cardboard box, inside we find: the player, various papers, a MicroUSB cable and a screen protector.

The body was clearly sawed out according to the molds of the Soviet elementary school ruler. Circles, triangles for buttons and a square for the screen. The body is made of aluminum. The build looks pretty solid. The only complaint, at least in my sample – the lock key on the left side and the volume buttons on the right side are a little loose and it’s unpleasant to creak. Really annoying at times.

In the rest the item is quite handy and light: a hundred grams – “and you and us”. The color in my case is black. The screen although simple, two-color, but quite pleasing to the eye. All navigation is under the screen. Buttons within one finger. The layout of the buttons, of course, raises some questions, but in principle, for a hundred and a half dollars is quite possible to endure and this. Although I read, that in some copies the keys are “squeaky” and other surprises can be found. One can only hope that the “violin played” the first parts…

Playback time from one battery charge was something like eight hours. The menu is simple and intuitive.

On the front panel is a screen, under it all the navigation power button, return to the main menu, options, switching forward, backward, and the start confirmation key . On the top end there are microUSB connectors, for synchronization with PC and connection to power adapter. On the bottom end are headphone and line outlets 3.5 mm. On the left side of the device is a player lock switch, the one that makes dirty noises. On the right end are the keys for volume control +/- , two microSD card slots and a hole for emergency reset of the player reset .

Sound

For listening the following headphones were used: Etymotic ER-4S, Westone UM3X, Phonak Audeo pfe 112 gray filters , Beyerdynamic dt 1350, Audio-Technica ATH-SX1a. With all headphones the device played very well. No obvious genre preferences in the device was not spotted.

The sound is balanced. No obvious peaks or valleys. The sound is not devoid of corporeity, every sound has weight. The musical canvas is painted in “big strokes”. What it lacks is the finest detail. The main material is presented clearly, but the minor nuances get obscured.

One more thing. Where the tempo is not fast and the number of instruments is not great, it seems to be quite good. And when “all the artillery” comes into play, the upper and lower edges of the frequency range recede a little into the background and merge there into the general orchestra pit. But that’s if you’re really picky. During the musical ecstasy resulting from the merge with your favorite songs, such lyrical digressions into the background may not be noticed at all.

The structure of the presentation of the musical material resembles stroking on a coarse corduroy of a darkish neutral hue. Not the one which is painted by David Lynch in his masterpiece “Blue Velvet”, but the stuff that our generation was wearing in the 80-s, when there was the Olympics-80, or a little later, after the bear had gone, and we all cried. The sound can also be on a gray background and with big strokes: the base is macro, but the micro is a dime a dozen..

Such disposition gives a kind of nostalgic vintage sound. No, it’s not bad, I even like it, it doesn’t prevent to bathe in music and enjoy it at all.

But there is one very important “But”! From the first minutes my experienced ear detected something wrong. The music played slower than usual. Not significant, but I noticed the “slow motion movie” from the first seconds, which is easy to fix if you run the same track synchronously on the xDuo X3 and on another source.

So what was it? If the software is lagging behind life, it’s quite a solvable issue with new firmware. And if the hardware or the circuitry slows down, my grief knows no bounds. What can I say?? As far as I know, the new firmware did not make the laggy sound faster. Though, I don’t loose the hope, that the producer will cope with this disappointing bug. “Otherwise, beautiful marquise…”

Conclusions

The tweeter is simplified, a little rough, polished. As a plus, no brightness and ringing. As a minus, a slight loss of detail. Where it should sound “d-zin”, we hear “sh-s” or even “sh-sh-sh” in some places.

The midrange is also a little bit polished, but without fanaticism. It’s all smooth and neutral and pretty good. What’s missing here is the smallest of details. Macro is plentiful, micro is lacking, as I wrote above. The result is a slight simplification of the musical material.

The bass has decent weight. The beats are quite massive, but a bit blurred. It’s pleasant to listen to clear compositions, but when the chorus is performed by many instruments at once and the speed increases, low frequencies pass and at this moment the bass gets blurred.

Summary

Not a bad and compact unit for its money. In summer, when the treacherous sun forces you to tear off your clothes to go practically naked, this baby is simply irreplaceable. The sound is well-balanced, for prolonged listening, which pleases me personally a lot.

But it’s frustrating that the sound is slow, the buttons squeak and everything. If these problems are solved, then the device is definitely recommended as a summer hi-fi. If someone doesn’t care about such flaws, then, in principle, everything else in the xDuoo X3 is quite decent – considering the player’s mini size, two memory card slots, weight, playing time and low price. At the time of writing the price in American online stores for xDuoo X3 was in the region of 8000 Dollars.

Size, weight, sound, price.

Problem with audio slowdown during playback. Key rattling.