Yes, it has huge bezels around. The actual screen is tiny.

Someone out there probably had a whole lot of fun with this and only needed to “make it an ad” to justify someone else putting the money into printing and publishing.

Well, at least this one only goes for $60.

It’s a DAP and a DAC rolled into one. It’s a very versatile device and I do foresee having this in my life for the foreseeable future.

Hmm, I guess I’m a “normal user” then. I’m looking to be more intentional with my music consumption after all, else something with the ability to stream music would’ve been a better deal otherwise.

Besides, just browse by artist or genre. The Mini would happily organize your music into genres>artists>albums anyway. Unless you have literally hundreds of albums, it shouldn’t be too big of a hassle I feel.

Here’s an update. The DAC works wonders, though it doesn’t apply any eq that you’ve set beforehand (for now). In other news, I found out I was compensating for bad mixing of certain songs with the Pop EQ. I am now back to no EQ.

I mean, I only connected my phone to the Mini to demo some new bandcamp music, and I was completely blown away by how open and large the instrument separation was. I thought the amazingness was due to Dolby atmos (it was off) or the phone’s equalizer (it was also off) or even my headphones’ DSP (my headphones was also off). It was none of that. I was simply getting it worse with the increased bass level of the EQ. The Ult Wear just muddies all the mids when the bass is out too strong, no matter where that tuning is coming from I’ve learned.

Tl;dr: this is an amazing device in terms of audio fidelity, with some understandable limitations that doesn’t detract from it’s wonderful audio quality. Sony’s sound engineers should be ashamed for pushing the Ult in a direction it’s not meant to be taking (lots of bass literally blowing everything else away). I think I now know why the Ult button is there, it’s not a feature, it’s a compromise.

Well, it doesn’t have the charming iconic form factor of the ipod. But it works just as well for a single purpose audio player, and it has a lot of charm in its own way.

Yes. Do eet. There’s even FOSS firmware for them now, in the form of rockbox.

I’ve got no issues whatsoever. But I did look up what to do before adding my SD card. The general consensus is that:

1. You should update the firmware when you receive it new out of the box, by connecting it as a usb device and dropping the latest firmware .iso into the root directory. I restarted the device after and it started flashing the firmware all by itself. FIIO had been very active on the firmware updates, fixing a lot of things in the process. I remembered the firmware being 1.3(?) on it before I updated it to 2.4 (yes, very active).
2. You need to format the SD card on the actual device before use, and do it twice. I did that with a reboot in between just in case.
3. Always eject the device/SD card properly. The Mini doesn’t handle corrupted audio files elegantly and would crash from what I’ve read. I never had an issue as I do unmount my SD card/Mini before unplugging from my phone. As an additional precaution, I would also turn the Mini off before ejecting the SD card from the device.

Edit: Remeber to refresh the media library every time you add, remove, or change any audio files. The Mini doesn’t do it automatically, which does make sense. The CPU is slow enough that the media refresh can potentially be a multi minute affair. I had to wait about 30 seconds for my meager library of around 11GB to load. Not to worry otherwise though, the UI itself is super responsive so far. Just speculation, but I suppose some of the potential crashes may have happened when someone tried playing a missing file.

Yeah, that would be great! It can’t support rockbox due to CPU limitations though, so we’ll likely have start from scratch, or at least make an overhaul for there to be OSS support for this.

Huh, in all the excitement, I’ve appeared to have actually left out the name of the device.

It’s a FIIO Snowsky Echo Mini. It’s their budget sub-brand lineup featuring their expertise in audio fidelity in as cheap a package everywhere else they could get away with. Not that the product isn’t otherwise good. The support (dev communication) is swift on the official forum and firmware is being updated very regularly—about monthly with new features each time.

It sounded really good to me. But this is my first wired audio device in a very long time, so I’m not the best judge of that. It is very likely I just didn’t like Sony’s DSP.

Edit: I do know that the logic board is where they cheaped out to get to that price point, with most of the effort going into the DAC with 2 CS43131 chips. It has both a 3.5mm, and also a 4.4mm balanced headphone jack like most FIIO products out there recently.

Press once. Scroll by one song once. Don’t, err, browse by all songs if you have a decent collection.

This is my first DAP actually, but the sound quality seems to be pretty good. My ANC Sony Ult Wear headphones wired and off do also sound clearer, more natural and open (no fake sounding bass muddying everything else) with the Pop Eq on the device. Compared to having the headphones connected to my phone via Bluetooth.

There’s no crash issues with the current firmware (v2.4.0) I’ve experienced, the Echo Mini has been dead on predictable in a way no Android phone could. However, it would load larger album images rather slowly, which would affect the wake up speed. There are tips out there about lowering the resolution of the album art to compensate, but I haven’t done that just yet.

There are preset EQs you can select on it, as well as a custom fixed frequency slider EQ that you can tune to your liking. The base acoustics is a bit lacking on the low end, making it sound a tad bit flat there, but the Pop EQ option did fix that for me. Due to the simplicity of the cpu however, EQ only works for “Standard Quality” 16 bit depth FLAC, not for 24 bit if you are going for lossless.

Do note that I have only loaded up a 16GB SD card with mostly FLAC files, when they are 16 bit depth, so I haven’t quite stressed it the same way some users have. I do know that it has a song limit of 8192, so do take that into account.

The battery is very good, a single charge has lasted me a whole day of listening with 2/4 bars left when I got home.

It can also function as a DAC if plugged into a phone/computer via the USB C port, but I haven’t had the chance to try that out yet.

I took way too many hours just comparing the different colors when I was considering buying it, but I’m glad I did. Pink really is the best color out of the lineup.

Cons:

1. Someone at work said something and I felt bad. So I’m not gonna take anymore for the rest of the day~
2. I woke up too late… Meh, it’s too much work to figure out when to take them.
3. I hyperfocused on something and skipped my alarm, now I’m an hour late to my dose. Oh well, maybe I should just skip this one.
4. I accidentally took a double, oops. Let me minus one off from later in the day.
5. Did I just take it? I did remember taking it, I think, maybe? But I forgot to mark it off… Or was it a memory from yesterday? Oh well, guess I wouldn’t really know now, so I’m just not going to take another.
6. I just don’t feel like it today.

I literally RSDed myself out of deleting my Reddit account. All while intellectually understanding (from the very beginning) that it’s emotion disregulation at work, and that no mod was really out to get me, nor cared, but that’s just cause Reddit is such a big place they couldn’t be sympathetic to and follow up on every post violation without burning themselves out.

I think the feeling of “all my friends hate me” can be a pretty vanilla ADHD experience too tbf. Although for the longest time before diagnosis, I thought that about my colleagues.

ADHD: The world is too noisy today and I can’t focus on that important thing I need to do instead of some stupid hyperfixation for 14 hours.

AuDHD: The world is too noisy today and I need to get out of here and recuperate.

Well, think of it this way. If they look really pretty, with nice healthy lush fur. Would they really make good “dead animal” paid actors?

I think I might need to work the weekends where I’m heading right now.