Bought this 2nd hand at such a steal price. Anything i need to know about this specific sony camera?

2nd pic is taken from the a6300 itself!!

Let me start off by saying that this is my first DAP from Snowsky/Fiio. Although i collect iPods so that’s some baseline at least.

Build Quality:

It’s amazing, for its build you’d think this costs more. Volume knob was tactile, has enough feedback with navigating through the interface and feels more analog. The normal buttons are okay, however i noticed when pressing the edge of the “next” button it can sometimes pause/play the music it’s playing as if i actually pressed the buttons of the actual pause. (Idk if this is an issue with my unit so results may vary).

What i wish though is they would’ve added an extra “back button” for navigating things easier.(will get to that in a bit)

Battery life:

People were doomposting about it. And I would say it’s kinda meh, but i wouldn’t say its bad either for how tiny this device is. But then again an iPod nano 6th gen still has better battery than this one has.

Based on my usage, i managed to use the whole battery by 4-6 hours. Songs are mostly on AAC. But my screen was on most of the time while listening.

The silver lining here it has type c and i can just plug it in for a quick charge (which the speeds are oddly capped in v1.2.0 and Fiio said its now optimized on v1.3.0 as of the time i’m writing this.)

The charging time is limited to 5 watts due to some reason and hope it’s fixed with the newer version.

Ui/Navigation:

This is where things can get pretty ugly. The UI does feel snappy though i’d give them that, but navigating it is a bit of a learning curve because of the confirm and back buttons are the same. For confirming a selection you PRESS the play/pause button, for going back you HOLD the play/pause button for 1.5 sec to go back to the previous menu. It gets annoying quickly when trying to configure the device as most of the time you end up confirming rather than going back or you either go back unintentionally vice versa, hence why i wished they added an extra “back button” for wayy easier navigation.

On the initial software of when i got this device it had albums where songs are not arranged according to track number despite it having in the metadata and the proper file name for it. (This was thankfully fixed in v1.2.0)

Finding specific songs on this device is quite hard, but at the same time it has such a tiny screen, what would you expect? But it does get the job done if you can wait.

Software:

Clearly this device doesn’t have the best software. The first version was quite buggy and it felt like i was a beta tester at some point trying to navigate features on the small set of buttons. You know why it felt like i was a beta tester? The manual just tells you the basic functions of each button, not the shortcuts, not how to favorite a song (which is broken on v1.2.0) not even how to put the screen in visualizer mode.

The equalizer is also broken on v1.2.0 so there’s that…😭

Unfortunately this doesn’t have playlisting or .m3u8 support which was kind of sad for me..

Literally i only found out you can favorite a song by double clicking previous track when in the song interface. You can change the main player how it looks by double clicking the next button. Great! Now i finally know how to navigate it thanks to a fellow redditor that found this feature accidentally.

I loved drag and dropping songs as if it was just a usb thumbdrive and doesn’t need any software which was a relief as an iPod user.

Audio quality:

It’s amazing. Just a fair disclaimer, i’m no audiophile with supersonic hearing, but i think i somehow know what sounds good or not and i know by this on the whole iPod wolfson vs cirrus DAC rabbit hole.

Sound out of the box is very good, you can just plug in your headphones and it’s even okay to not customize the eq because it’s already okay as is… err… if the eq bug is fixed then yeah maybe tweak it to for personal preference.

My songs are mostly on AAC as this is a direct copy paste from my iPod library. I recently added flac files and it sounds just as good still.

Aesthetics/Aura points:

This design is sort of derived from the sony perfume bottle mp3 player, not a direct copy paste, but this device has its own identity which i find a really good thing.

Friends and family said it looks like a vape when the screen is off. It made me look like an nicotine addict (which i sort of am) but obviously why would i admit that to people.

In my opinion it looks very good and honestly loved wearing it on my way to uni and commuting and people are looking at it since it’s unique.

Final thoughts:

Was it Worth it? Well yes sort of..

Would i buy this as my first DAP? No
Would i buy this as a secondary DAP? Heck yeah.

The software is kind of messed up in it’s current state, i would recommend to wait for a bit until the software is as polished as the other echo lineups.

Price alone makes this worth it, what makes it not worth it is how currently expensive the sd cards are and you have to take into account this device is picky with certain sd cards and not read despite proper formatting.

Tldr: buy it as a secondary dap not as first/primary.

They finally fixed the shuffle issue lol

I reseated it multiple times and for some reason it still won’t work…

Idk if you can see it, but this psp has very many obvious battle scars. The only thing i changed here is the button membranes and the battery and it was better than what i initially had!