Setup, Customization and Performance

Now it was time to finally turn on the FiiO Q7 by pressing and holding down the power button for a couple of seconds. You will notice the various indicator lights turning on along with the screen itself, that asks you to choose the operating language. It's not a touch screen so you have to use the multi-function wheel at the top to first highlight the desired option and then press down to select it. This is also an opportune time to talk about those lights present underneath the wheel but also on either side of the Q7 as seen above. As with FiiO's recent K-series of desktop sources, the ring light indicates the sampling rate in playback going from blue for 44.1/48 KHz to yellow for 88.2/96/176/352.8/384/705.6/768K Hz to green for DSD64/128/256/512 and magenta for everyone's favorite, MQA. The ambient lights also allow easy visualization of the connection mode and the two come together also for Bluetooth codec identification too, as listed in the quick start guide. They otherwise cycle through colors randomly when there is no connection and they can be turned off via the mobile app as we shall soon see. Once powered on, the wheel helps cycle through the various connection modes and the screen helps so much that this alone is a neat feature for portable DAC/amps, and hopefully also FiiO desktop sources going forward.


The FiiO Q7 when plugged in and used in high gain or higher, or even super high gain on battery to a balanced output, can end up uncomfortably warm. Any potential customer interested in this needs to be aware of the basics physics challenge involved in heat dissipation off a smaller heat transfer area. This is why the cooling stand comes included in the box and I recommend using it in higher power draw scenarios. Be sure to remove the case though and let the fan cool the unit, but note that the back of the Q7 is not metal and thus less conductive than the sides so it's an inefficient cooler. Thankfully, you don't need to have the fan on at full blast to compensate and I found the slowest speed setting to work plenty fine as far as not holding back the Q7's performance—it's not like you will be touching or holding it when on the stand anyway. The Q7 also has in-built overheating and overloading protection to further prevent any issues this way. Another thing to note is the inputs are all still fully accessible, courtesy the cutout in the stand. Also, while it's not the best use case here, the stand does help raise the Q7 to where you can use the side ambient lights to better identify the operating modes in conjunction with the screen itself.


Pressing and holding down the button associated with the wheel up top brings up the actual menu on the Q7 and here there are even more options including gain (low/medium/high/super high on battery with a fifth ultra high available when plugged in), choosing whether the single-ended and balanced outputs are headphone out or line out, whether the line out volume is adjustable or fixed at max so you can use the Q7 as a preamp or a dedicated DAC connected to another amplifier, change the max volume from 20-120 so as to not accidentally blow out your ears, add in various filters (fast/slow/mini/mini slow/apodizing/hybrid fast/brick wall), dim the screen by changing the brightness on a scale of 1-5, choose the screen timeout from 5-30 s of inactivity, and even set the USB audio class to UAC 1.0 or UAC 2.0 so you can use the Q7 with your PC just as well as with your gaming console too. You can also change the operating language again here, as well as do a factory reset if you don't feel like poking into the reset button on the bottom.


The Qualcomm QCC5124 Bluetooth SoC means the FiiO Q7 accepts Bluetooth input from a variety of sources, which can be quite handy for when you just want to relax with your favorite streaming platform on the phone and couldn't be bothered to plug it in. I had no problem pairing it with my phone, and the Q7 supports AAC/SBC/aptX/aptX LL/aptX adaptive/aptX HD/LDAC codecs for good measure.


But the more impressive application of that chipset comes is the 2-way communication with the FiiO Control mobile app available for both Android and iOS. I can't speak for the iOS app, but many negative reviews on the Android platform are clear cases of user error, with several people not understanding that it is a complementary app to hardware and doesn't do much by itself. That's where the FiiO Music app comes in, but I won't talk about it too much since you would only use it on your phone in conjunction with the Q7 to effectively become an M17 DAP. The FiiO Control app launches a 3-page quick start guide walking you through how to add devices and configure them using the app, and I was able to add the Q7 over Bluetooth easily. Note that you do not have to have it set to Bluetooth input for this, courtesy a dedicated Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) connection to the app separate from the full-fledged Bluetooth input mode. This means that all these nice features are accessible with all input and output modes! All you have to do is make sure your app is version 2.8 or newer, and you can find the APK file for more information here. The app allows you to control the indicator lights, change the channel balance, as well as have EQ functionality—a 10-band complete with some presets and your own custom profiles too. Unfortunately there is still no parametric EQ here so I have to urge FiiO to work on this sooner than later.


Using the FiiO Q7 with Windows 10 or 11 doesn't require any additional drivers, with Windows recognizing the device automatically. We see that the default firmware provides PCM playback options up to 32-bit, 384 kHz. The XMOS XUF316 USB encoder microcontroller comes in handy here, and all your favorite players will recognize the device in WASAPI (Windows Audio Session API) mode accordingly. There should be equivalent drivers pre-configured in newer macOS builds too, but I am not familiar enough to speak on this front.


If you have a device that doesn't accept UAC 2.0, or even if you simply want to try other options, then the FiiO USB audio device drivers will be of interest to you. You can find the installer on this page and the latest version at the time of testing was v5.30.0. Installation is trivial as seen above, and these drivers now allow you to make the most of the FiiO Q7 within the Windows operating system.



What it then does is create a new output device in Windows as well as provides access to the FiiO USB Audio Control Panel. Just be sure to set the format to 24-bit and choose the ASIO (Audio Stream Input/Output) buffer size that suits your latency requirements—that's about it. With that done, go to your media player of choice. I demonstrated above with JRiver again and set the audio player to the same output. At this point, you can implement further tweaks, but those are player dependent. These drivers also provide 24-bit playback support for those who find it useful.

This is as good a time as any to summarize the capabilities of the FiiO Q7 Aurora with its ES9038PRO DAC, and all the branding on the device would have also prepared you to deal with the MQA support that FiiO is proud to market. This time around, we get only up to 8x on-device rendering as opposed to the full 16x. This is no big loss to me (get it?), but the 32-bit, 768 KHz PCM and DSD512 playback (over USB) will be more relevant in usage. The max PCM playback rates are really not very practical here, but if you do go the DSD route, then I can see DSD256 and higher being valid enough reasons to consider this. Over COAX you get up to 192 kHz/24-bit PCM and DSD64 playback whereas optical in reduces it further to a max of 96 kHz/24-bit PCM. There are too many performance metrics to list, given the various outputs and gain levels so I'll leave you to look over the impressive numbers in the specifications table here.


When it comes to headphone outputs you get two single-ended and two balanced connections available on the FiiO Q7 to allow most headphones and IEMs to be powered off it easily. FiiO recommends the SE outputs for headphones of impedance 16-150 Ω and the balanced outputs for an equivalent 16-300 Ω range. It worked beautifully with the 300 Ω Sennheiser HD 6XX, for example, as well as planar headphones with lower impedances such as the HIFIMAN HE1000se pictured above. IEMs are still fine off either output but obviously start off on SE/low gain and then see whether you need to up the power. Indeed, the Q7 is a beast in that it provides up to 1.5 W per channel off the battery alone (balanced outputs at 16 or 32 Ω) in super high gain mode which goes up to 3 W continuous power per channel in the plugged-in ultra-high gain mode at 32 Ω going down to 1.5 W at 16 Ω and 500 mW at 300 Ω! The FiiO Q7 will get just about any set of headphones, including the notoriously hard to drive HIFIMAN Susvara, loud enough. It's then up to you to decide whether that's enough for you subjectively.


I spent a week using only the FiiO Q7 with a variety of IEMs and headphones to fully test how it sounds, knowing already that it does have enough juice as mentioned above. The line out features worked very well and I have no complaints on that front. I was also tempted to use it in a pure DAC mode to drive e-stats off the BHSE but decided it was too impractical to bother. This is truly a desktop-class source in a portable body, to where I can't help but think it's best suited with headphones more than IEMs—especially low impedance and highly sensitive hybrid/tribrid sets that can draw a slight hiss in the background when nothing is playing, and occasionally even when something is. Anything more typical presents a dark background and an engaging sound without any coloring from the Q7 itself. As with just about any other such ESS ES9038PRO—or seemingly every ESS DAC these days—you get a transparent, accurate, detailed, and arguably a touch too sterile sound coming out. Aside from this, I can't really tell you whether the FiiO Q7 opens up the soundstage or synergizes tremendously with some headphones given it's a linear amplifier paired with a transparent DAC in all fundamental tones. It doesn't hold back anything I have on hand at least, but I admittedly did have a better time with some R-2R DACs and hybrid amplifiers on higher-end headphones such as the Focal Utopia (2022), whose review will be coming soon.