FiiO BTR5 - Official Thread

I’m surprised this isn’t on here yet.
FiiO’s new-ish BTR5 is pretty sweet!

I’ve been using mine for the past few weeks with a few different headphones.
Puts out quite a bit of power for something so small.

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I’m surprised too I was looking to buy one last week and there is no place to buy it other than Aliexpress or very expensive on Amazon( about $180 and not prime).
I would like to heard about advantages over the ES100, if there were any.

Having an eye on this as well. Not in a rush though.

Are you happy with the battery life?

I got mine for $110 from Amazon couple months ago and after two of my co-workers bought it from the same link, it went up to $140. I suspect there’s some kind of price gouging algorithm involved there or maybe just the seller happened to increase the price at that time. :man_shrugging:
It’s a really good Bluetooth dac/amp. It’s powerful enough to power my HD6XX (through balanced out) and battery life is pretty decent. It lasted about 5 hrs on high gain, 40/100 on the volume (AAC codec). I tried it on my friends’ phone using LDAC, sound detail increase is there but not night and day. Both sourced from Spotify. It has this music player app that also allows user to tweak the sound (except when you’re using LDAC). Overall it’s functional App but rather sub-standard honestly. It’s worth $100 but not $180 imo.

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The supply has been pretty up-and-down, so has the price.

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I can’t complain. Though I use it plugged in as a wired DAC half the time so it’s not running exclusively off battery.

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I’ll wait until it gets below $70 then. :upside_down_face:

I use mine for my work day. it’s paired for about 9 hours and probably 3-5 hours of playback from music and videos. by the end of the day i usually have 1-2 bars left on the battery indicator

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Haha eventually it’ll get there. :wink:

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For me, my issue with FiiO products will always be that they only offer 6 month warranty on their products with batteries. Which is about 75% of their product line.

If a company can’t stand behind their product for longer than 6 months it gives me pause right away.

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That’s fair.
Not sure what industry standard is, but 6 months does seem a bit on the low end.

I understand but don’t defend the policy – audio products involve repeated (daily?) deep discharges that may shorten battery life. Per my last reading on this subject, rechargeable batteries have only about 300 full charge cycles before they wear out.

This may be to forestall returns/complaints about shortened battery life.

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it is the unfortunate reality of any electronic with a non-replaceable lithium ion battery. I tend to look at these as a consumable product, it obviously shouldn’t outright die but anything seeing regular use will start to deteriorate at some point depending on the amount of use. I agree, I understand their point if I’m using this device heavily for 9 months and the battery now only holds a charge for 5-7 hours as opposed to the advertised 9 that is just the unfortunate nature of the technology, but most consumers won’t see it that way and demand a replacement.

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Amos did a review @Currawong

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Just received the HD6xx in the mail and it seems to do very well on the BTR5 IMO.

I’m interested to see how it does with the balanced output.

It’s just more power fed to the headphone. I can’t hear any change in sound quality.

The impact of balanced varies by headphone type/model. In some cases the change is obvious while in others it adds nothing.

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Just an update on my experience with the BTR5.

I’ve tried the HD6xx and the HE4xx on single ended and balanced.

On both headphones, the balanced output made all the difference in the world.
With the single ended output, the HE4xx sounded like a great set of tweeters. But the balanced output actually gave life to the music. Of course this is probably due to the power as the BTR5 is rated for 80mw @ 32 ohms on single ended and 240mw @ 32 ohms on balanced.

IMO, this makes the balanced output one of the most important features of this device.

Of course it would be great if it could drive headphones just as well on single ended, but the option is there.

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Where did you get your balanced cable for the 6XX?

Just off amazon.
A little pricey but it wasn’t a bad wire.

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