Hifi sat nav. Even without spoken directions from a girl in a box, getting around FiiO's PureMusic skin was intuitive. A pulldown from the upper edge followed by another one brings up all commonly used shortcuts including display brightness, 5-stage gain and on-the-fly DSD64 conversion. Engaging DSD resampling pauses the currently playing track. Hit play again to commence in the new mode for convenient A/B. DSD certainly sounds different. There's even a two-stage 2nd-harmonic THD profile to play with. Night mode injects an amber tint into the display to counter eye fatigue by mellowing contrast. Creating 'favorites' is as simple as touching the heart icon beneath a track. That automatically adds it to our 'favorites' playlist. Creating new playlists is done with the '+' icon next to it. That opens a keyboard to enter our playlist's name. Subsequent pressing of '+' brings up however many lists we've created. Highlighting the desired one adds the new track to it. There are two options for what the three square icons beneath the screen control. I set it so the left square returns us one menu layer. To black out the display and light rings is done via quick press of the volume button. Now the R7 turns into a pitch-black monolith; unless ours is the white version. The folder-view option is mandatory if we upload custom music folders. I have two which contain up to 200 tracks by different artists/albums; and one with close to 20 albums by the same artist. In album or artist mode, such folders obviously break apart. The only way to access them as sequenced in their totality is in folder view. The next photo shows the icons for displaying a library by song, artist, album, genre or folder. Here we see 9-up album mode so that icon is red.

Angled desktop speaker stand on R7 duty; cover for the headfi sockets in front.

One weirdness is how FiiO treat corrupted files. On Shanling's M3 Ultra, those display just won't play. We simply hit 'next' and hopefully that track plays fine. On the R7 the display goes black and its back, play/pause and forward controls freeze as though we had crashed the OS. We must hit the 'menu back' key below the display to see the current album again before we can try the next track. Rinse and repeat. A firmware update really should fix this. Files can corrupt during transfer onto an SD card; or become inaccessible when long-term use 'tires out' a card or perhaps causes errors in its table of contents.

The next photo shows again how on a repurposed desktop-speaker stand, the R7 sat at the necessary height and rake to aim its display straight at me without involving my earlier wooden stack. FiiO might consider revising their wedge plinth to create far more tilt-back. As for my external 4TB SSD, the R7 couldn't access it (not supported it said) without prior reformatting. Concerned that this would erase all of its contents, I decided against chancing it. Perhaps the R7's onboard RAM isn't sufficient to index 4TB worth of music data and a smaller drive would have been read just fine?

Here's a final view on my new upstairs source. Though I opined earlier that sonic differences between file transports should be minimal at best particularly when being reclocked externally, I must admit that over Shanling's DAP, the R7 does sound more resolved and grippy. I certainly can't explain why. On headfi duty, the bodacious and fun tuning of Meze's 109 Pro makes it an ideal mate for opamp-based gain which usually measures sterling but can get harmonically lean, dimensionally flat and overdamped. To my ears my Meze really want no 2nd-harmonic thickening to favour 'typical' class D or IC-drive virtues of high damping, stiff feedback and very low distortion. For these Romanians I found the R7's tuning virtually ideal. Completely noise-free operation was the cherry on top.

Should I discover more worthwhile or critical surprises whilst I clock mileage, I'll add them here in due time. For now it's a wrap with one very happy punter. In my niche application, it's all I could want for such a fair price, nice build and physically attractive execution. It even makes a convenient headphone stand since as a digital transport, it runs very cool. R7 for Rx indeed.

October 6th. I updated the firmware from v.1.01 to v1.03 by connecting the R7 to our router via Ethernet. As soon as I did, I was alerted to the available update with a list of added features and fixes then asked whether I wanted to proceed. The whole process was glitch free and a few minutes later my R7 had a few new tricks up its sleeve like an alternate volume display. And I'd already learnt that a VU meter embeds in its Pure Music app. I brought it up once 'by mistake' but haven't figured out how to repeat it yet. The lack of a comprehensive owner's manual equals an Eastern egg hunt. Just press on even the tiniest icon or question mark and see what happens. The 'back' button will always get you out of any dark alley.

VU meter mode 7 | R7 asking permission to connect to D300Ref USB bridge. Once you do, bye-bye headfi.

October 7th. Figuring that the VU meter option in FiiO's Pure Music app had to be on the main playback screen yet none of the icons led to it, I finally tapped on the album art. Et voilà. Also, the moment USB-C is used as an output into a live DAC for which the R7 requests our permission to connect to, the headphone ports go offline. They only revive when the DAC powers back down. In short, that USB-out link overrides all the lower rotary's settings. It would be nice if one could freely select between USB out and headfi without having to power down one's outboard DAC. Perhaps v1.04 will add that feature should FiiO be reading this? As John Darko reminds us, the VU meter won't come up in Android mode because there one runs Apple Music, Spotify or Tidal atop Android 10 and these music providers don't include VU meter functionality in their own code.