Sanity check before buying FiiO BTR5

Purchase Advice
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I may be doing some unexpected long-ish term traveling so looking for a small dac to run the K702.

Not looking for best possible portable, just something above a phone/ipad analog out.

I have had some surprising positive results with EQ so that is something I wouldn’t want to give up.

BTR5 seems to get the edge over SE100 but they seem pretty close feature-wise.

There would have to be a night-and-day improvement in order to move above the $109 level.

I wanted to check with the warriors before making a decision.

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You really should check Qudelix 5K. Friend bought it, I tested it for few days and they sounded amazing with Ether CX and especially Verite Closed! The balanced output has tons of power. I haven’t checked much of them but beats Mojo everytime, that he sent too. Didn’t AB them to other smaller gear but it was on par with Monolith THX AAA dacamp.

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Thanks for the heads-up on the 5K. I see it also has parametric EQ which is what I’m using now. Might be a winner!

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I have the btr3 and it’s good. I know someone around here has the 5, I’m hoping they chime in

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5

Have both, ES100 for year and a half now and BTR5 since early this year. The only reason I’ll take the Fiio over the ES is the power to drive more hard to drive earphones.
Bluetooth connection is better on ES ( is not bad on the Fiio, just not as good)
ES is smaller and easy to clip on your shirt.
And the most importan, all the software part is a pleasure on the ES vs a pain on BTR5.
I only use both for IEM .

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I do not have experience with 5K, but between ES100 and BTR5, I would choose ES100 especially for EQing. EQ app with ES100 worked more stably without any surprises. One surprise I experienced with BTR5 is that it does not support EQing over LDAC.

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@Hansel, @Chang_Hwa_Lee
Thanks for the operational and daily use info. That kind of thing you can’t get from the manuals.

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I noticed these all are differential with single-ended output in the 80mw range, the same ballpark as a standard dongle.

Sometimes I wish for the old days where you loaded the cd, pressed play and that’s all there was to it.

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I’ve been using an Es100 for the last 18 months and very happy with it… I did just pick up the 5K, essentially a Gen 2 es100 as it is the same designer, but haven’t done comparisons yet.

Runs ldac great and very happy with sound for portable use with Meze 99s, which I run balanced - which to me represents slightly better imaging and staging

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I would be interested in what you think of the 5K.

My “may be traveling” is now “most likely will be traveling” so I’ll need to put together a travel headphone bag in the coming weeks.

Yes, I know in another thread I said I was in a spending freeze but life has intervened.

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:joy:. Funny how ‘spending freeze’ means something different applied to our gear and our music!

I will likely be doing some comparisons this weekend - and then my zmf VO arrives on Tuesday, so I will endeavor to provide some impressions of that as well…

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Is your pendant coming with it? Very exciting!

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Have you consider the Lotoo PAW S1? Here

No bluetooth but otherwise has a good rep.

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I think so! But guess I won’t know for sure til it arrives. LOL

But FedEx has already pushed me back a day from original estimate… Grrr

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15

Hopefully you get the entire package you ordered!!

Ive been making it slowly up the list. Think my VO will be done in the next couple of weeks, it’s at the last stage.

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The safer bet is the ES100 but I ordered the 5K for a little adventure.

They seem to be listening to customers and making frequent firmware and app updates.

We’ll see how it works out.

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