SD. For music playback I view an SD card like a micro SSD just with one less 's'. Neither has moving parts but the card is even smaller and needs no cable. Everything-always types used to the instant access of an Apple Music & Bros. cloud library will obviously balk at local storage limits; paying money to own music; and the need to whittle down choices then physically drag 'n' drop files. Yet a DAP makes for an effective half-way house between primitive folder-tree device sans cover art or touch screen like our Soundaware D300Ref; and a modern smartphone. It copies the latter's GUI and gestures to be instantly familiar. Then it bins all calls and camera features.

Over a mobile DAP the R7 adds constant AC power, socketry and raw drive. With this 1TB card selling for £116 on Amazon just then, few owners of physical music libraries should feel short-changed on storage capacity. Where more memory is needed because one doesn't want to rotate multiple cards, the USB host port welcomes an external SSD. I had a loaded 4TB job in the downstairs system to test that very scenario.

So I'd focus exclusively on the three ports at right; then add some headfi'ing over the frontal XLR4. Having never dealt with fiio.eu before, I was curious about their fulfilment etiquette. Taking my money and saying so took mere automated seconds. That was on a Thursday at 11:00. 24 hours later I still had no update or tracking #. Being part of the EU meant no VAT hassles with Ireland's Republic. They promise dispatch 3-4 days past order confirmation and a 24-month warranty tracked by their electronic receipt. Though I checked out as guest, they auto-generated a password against my email for quick access to my transactions page. By late Monday I had a tracking link from Direx on behalf of DHL. By Wednesday morning, an email from Evangelos Kioutsoukis at audioline.bg alerted me that DHL had issues with my address. As I saw, their order entry system had changed our county Clare to the province of Munster which also includes Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Waterford and Kerry to definitely cross delivery wires. Since DHL caught it before my package boarded, I expected an easy course correction. It simply would have helped had Evangelos' email come through the fiio.eu server. Not recognizing the sender, I nearly deleted the email as junk. When I checked on audioline.bg, I saw an all-Bulgarian hifi site with many other brands. Apparently fiio.eu is their dedicated export arm to attract sales from outside the country. Later on Wednesday DHL still showed my tracker as invalid, my transaction page an unfulfilled order. But by Thursday morning I received the original Direx tracker again. It suggested that DHL had rescheduled my pickup in Sofia. By 17:30 that evening, the Direx page showed my shipment as dispatched. A day later it delivered at 10:30. The Bulgarians had surrounded Fiio's stock box with a taped-up foam cube wrapped in black plastic film for extra impact and moisture protection. Minor address snafu excepted, this had been a sterling and timely transaction. As an aside, look to Shanling's EM7, Lotoo's Mjölnir or Astell & Kern's ACRO CA1000 for competing albeit far costlier fellow DAP crossover solutions.

Once the R7 was set to English, navigation and importing my first 1'765 music tracks from microSD card was a quick cinch. A few minutes later, USB-C spit out native digits to our Soundaware D300Ref. I had sound. Now I stepped through the menu to customize the display, light-ring color and other adjustables. Even for white hairs like mine this was baby stuff, no cheating with an owner's manual required – not that one includes except for a super-basic quick start guide. A surprise was seeing the R7 speak fluent Greek, Turkish and other tasty tongues. How so?

Voilà, the intended side-table landing for the in-bound R7.

Some of my world music metadata don't use the basic English alphabet; or include characters like ç, ö, ä, ê, š etc. Many players before the R7 rendered those as '?' or worse, Chinese kanji. When as in the next photo an entire track title writes out in non-anglicized Greek to then go all Chinese or question marks, it looks odd. FiiO's OS sailed through this admittedly esoteric spelling bee at 100.

Use mouse-over loupe for the full-size details.

Its 5° plinth meanwhile was far too flat to incline the display enough for face-on backlighting rather than render it dim from being seen off-axis. Our hifi closet unearthed these wooden Fram Audio tilt cradles. Stacked two up plus FiiO's own lean created enough elevation and rake to present me with a properly lit view. In high gain, Meze's 109 Pro off the XLR4 port sat at ~68/120 so about half mast for skull-busting SPL. Yet the R7 still had two higher gain modes on reserve. Peaches 'n' cream. Could I get the R7's OS to stutter or betray any operational oddities? After all, the GUI, gesture conventions and other access matters become paramount whenever we discuss digital transports. Sonic differences at my FiiO/Shanling level are basically nil when a Soundaware caliber deck handles buffering, reclocking and dejittering. Now transport featurization rules. That's down to an intuitive interface which scans, serves and cues up our music by different search criteria quickly and reliably. We want to be in the happy listening business not any hapless futzing busyness.