User Experience and Performance Testing

There is so much you can do with the FiiO R7 that I am sure I would have missed some already. On this page I'll mostly cover the use cases I ended up finding, with the simplest one being to just use the screen and the Android OS for various things including general media consumption. Did you know that TechPowerUp has an actual YouTube channel? We've recently started adding in videos for major CPU and GPU launches including having a dedicated host with decent production quality on the videos! I figured it would be hilarious to watch the AMD Ryzen 7 7700 & 7600 Review video on the R7 connected to my active speakers and it works quite well as expected with the screen automatically recognizing it's in landscape mode for the video. It's not the easiest to watch at that angle however, but this is where the display out option over the Type-C port comes in to allow an external monitor or compatible TV to have a larger screen on offer. Indeed, I found myself using the FiiO R7 in the living room too and having an Android remote control app on the device as well as my phone so I could do everything that way. Then I realized I could just use a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to where the R7 can be a legitimate living room A/V hub too. The planned remote control will make this even simpler to achieve.


You might have seen the FiiO R7 specify it is "Roon Ready" and even have a dedicated operating mode for it. For those unaware, Roon is quite possibly the best thing you could have if you tend to go with local storage of music files over streaming. It's the best music organizer and player I've used to date with a clean UI and fantastic PCM and DSD playback alike. There are some streaming apps supported by it too and the amount of useful information it provides on the music artists and their work also makes it easy to discover others that may be to your liking. It's a paid subscription (or lifetime) that may seem confusing given it does not actually provide you with music content but I started using it recently and have already discovered the benefits which include easy-to-use digital filters to customize the tonality of headphones/speakers etc. If you are interested to give it a try, you can use this link to get a free 30-day trial (I don't get anything out of it). The takeaway here is that being Roon Ready or a Roon Partner is a good feature to note for audiophiles when it comes to streaming devices and the FiiO R7 in the Roon mode is automatically detected by the Roon core (my desktop PC in this case) to allow for my local files on the desktop to be easily played on the R7 via WiFi flawlessly. You can see how the screen automatically re-frames the information displayed on my monitor in landscape mode to the R7's screen in portrait mode too.


Obviously you can use any other streaming platform or local storage for music playback too, and the FiiO R7 has a system-wide "All to DSD" functionality that we saw before. I was curious to see how the device would fare in this mode, set to ultra gain, and in the PO + preamp connection mode. I had an entire album running for over an hour before I quickly disconnected the XLR headphone cable so it would not block the R7's thermal images captured on my FLIR C5. As you can see the entire device runs cool to the touch and under my own body temperature, albeit the ambient was quite cool too given the UK winter season. Interestingly, it is the capacitive buttons underneath the screen that run the warmest even though I had not touched them for a while. Regardless, I have no thermal concerns with the FiiO R7.


You can also connect to the FiiO R7 via Bluetooth and use it for media playback that way. I had no problems pairing it with my phone in LDAC mode and then making sure the higher playback rate setting was chosen in the R7's settings menu. I previously showed how the microSD card slot is nice and I even tested the USB host slot with a NAS to make sure it works as advertised. But most of my testing was done with the FiiO R7 connected to my PC using the USB cable provided in USB DAC mode. Windows 10 or 11 doesn't require any additional drivers with the OS recognizing the device automatically as headphones no matter the analog output mode selected, curiously enough. We see that the default firmware provides PCM playback options up to 2-channel, 32-bit, 384 kHz in addition to DSD256. The USB decoder 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 R7 within the Windows operating system.



What it then does is create a new output device in Windows as well as provide access to the FiiO USB Audio Control Panel. You can 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, and it "improves" to 32-bit/768 kHz PCM or DSD512 in USB Audio modes including with Roon as seen before, although I can't really tell you the extra playback rates make a difference. The LED indicator rings around the knobs change color based on the playback rate/type as well as wireless connectivity mode/codec too. Of course there is also MQA support here for those on Tidal but that's about the extent of it I will mention here.

Audio Performance

Now that you have had a good idea of what the FiiO R7 is capable on feature wise, let's talk more about its basic functionality as an audio source itself. We saw before how you can connect headphones and speakers to the R7, including both simultaneously for a few different use cases. I'll talk more about this at a separate time assuming FiiO decides to send over its upcoming SP3 speakers for review. In the meantime we can proceed with the headphone outputs wherein you get both single-ended (1/4") and balanced (4-pin XLR, 4.4 mm TRRS) connections. This allows for easy use of headphones and earphones alike, especially with the provided 3.5 mm to 6.35 mm (1/4") adapter for IEM cables. I have demonstrated above the FiiO R7 connected to the HIFIMAN HE1000se as well as the recently released FiiO FH15 IEMs (review coming soon), and the low output impedance (<0.5 Ω across all three) makes the FiiO R7 conducive for use with even the most sensitive of IEMs. Start off with low gain and low volume before increasing the gain/volume levels carefully as desired. The single-ended connector can put out up to 1.85 W per channel at 16 Ω and 160 mW at 300 Ω at the highest gain level, and the balanced outputs are better suited for higher impedance devices given they are rated for as much as 3.2 W per channel at 32 Ω and 660 mW at 300 Ω all while maintaining THD+N <1%. It's more power than even most flagship headphones need, and I barely found myself even going past the default high gain mode on the R7 except when trying it with more demanding headphones such as the HIFIMAN Susvara and the the MOONDROP VENUS we recently saw. The presence of two gain modes above and below combined with the extensive volume controls and other audio settings makes this a good pairing across the board.


I spent a few days using only the FiiO R7 with a variety of IEMs and headphones to fully test how it sounds in various operating modes, knowing already that it does have enough juice as mentioned above. The line out and preamp features worked very well and I have no complaints on that front. I then set it to USB DAC mode again and measured the frequency response as seen above. We've seen another implementation of a single ES9068AS DAC chip before, although there Yulong deliberately implemented it to cater to a "better" sounding experience rather than the best measuring one necessarily. I put better in quotes here because my experience may not be the same as yours, especially if you are a firm believer in DACs needing to sound transparent and a solid state linear amplifier doing no different. There are of course DACs that would come off warmer owing to different topologies as well as tube amplifiers which use distortions to add positively to the listening experience. The FiiO R7 with its fairly standard ESS Sabre DAC implementation and two THX linear amplifiers is not one of those. You get the expected clean and dark background resulting in an accurate sound signature across the entire frequency range. The ES9068AS and THX 788+ can sound slightly lean in the higher frequencies compared to even the FiiO K9 Pro with its dual ES9038PRO DACs, but even careful A/B testing would not reveal much more beyond that. The FiiO R7 is capable, resolving, and analytical to where it won't do much to the sound that your music files and transducer won't do already.