Introduction

It was only recently that I had finished testing yet another impressive FiiO DAC/amp in the form of the excellent value-for-money K7. This had marked the sixth such source from the Chinese audio brand that I had reviewed over the last year and then some, and they’ve ranged from portable Bluetooth DAC/amps to big desktop class DAC/amps and things in between that can be either depending on your mood. In each case, the product being covered has offered both DAC and headphone amplifier functions allowing for users to save space and potentially also money compared to a separate stack of a dedicated DAC and amplifier similar to those we’ve seen from TOPPING and S.M.S.L before. With products such as the UTWS5 and Q7, it would be safe to say that FiiO is not afraid of experimenting with new use cases and form factors. But nothing prepared me for what was to come next.

FiiO had originally teased the R7 as part of its 2022 product roadmap, but clearly logistics issues and external factors resulted in several of the proposed items being delayed to 2023. A launch event took place in early Jan this year where FiiO talked about diving head first into the desktop audio realm by introducing the company’s first speakers—the FiiO SP3, pictured above alongside a white R7 that should be coming up soon to complement the default black color version—and HiFi wired headphones alongside the R7. I am still struggling to summarize what the FiiO R7 is except to say that it’s best treated as a desktop DAP (digital audio player). It goes further beyond having an integrated DAC and headphones amplifier by also incorporating a network streamer with screen and an Android system to where FiiO hopes for the R7 to be the first of its kind. There have been similar such attempts from the likes of Shanling and Astell&Kern but they have been simply too expensive to gain any traction and also just felt like a screen tacked on rather than being a cohesive part of the design. There is so much to talk about the FiiO R7—you have no idea of all it is capable of—so let’s thank FiiO for providing a review sample to TechPowerUp and begin with a look at the product specifications below, so be sure to click the image twice to fully open it and go through all the details.

Specifications