School girl tech

Every modern young lady I ever met had some interest in music  whither or not it was just about the look and fashion of the artists, just singing the songs and usually some way of playing our favourite music.
Obviously with changing times, what it is we have changes as some products come to the end of their lives and others replace them and so while I was infatuated at one time with reels of tape, also I was an early adopter of the Japanese craze of the MiniDisc although that technology has come to something of a dead end with the discontinuing of recorders.

I have had personal digital audio players using either downloaded albums or home made copies, not least the Sandisk Clip Zip of which there is a feature on this blog but they didn't quite match the best of my portable MiniDisc machines as modern players are designed more about maximizing running time between charges rather than fitting the best possible  sounding electronics and that still left the question of playing music on them through a regular stereo a bit messy.
Like why would you want to fire up a computer to just play something?
I had considered a number of ways around this over the last year and very recently I obtained what is proving to be the answer.

Enter the Fiio X3.
It's a digital audio player for sure but it is designed from the ground up to sound really good starting with using the same chip to convert the zeroes and ones of digital to analogue sound  as a £400 separate cd player and a very high quality headphone stage that cures at the outset the problem of not enough of and the failure to reproduce fully, the sound even from iTunes or better quality Mp3 albums.
Then there is the fact it also plays not only regular 16 bit lossless (Flac) downloads and home copied files equalling the full quality of a cd, it plays 24 bit better than cd ones too (192/24 being its limit) and it sounds on headphones better than many separates.
In the UK you can by cd and better than cd  quality downloads from Presto who do Classical music and 7Digital as well as the French Qobuz company for much else like Rock.
Compared with the ClipZip, the display has much better resolution, nearer a cellphones and isn't as restricted to the maximum number of pixels as that player is when it comes to artwork.
It has 8GB of internal memory but you can use upto 128GB micro sdhc cards too that might be pre-assembled by genre just like I did for the Clip Zip and its cards worked straight off the bat on it.
The kicker though is it for once has a proper line level output just like a cd player rather than relying on a crummy headphone stage with it's built in restrictions, so armed with lossless files it sounds equal to or actually better than a dedicated cd player.
Throw in the ability to play from a charger while charging and you too can be listening in really high quality to all those files while being portable enough to carry around with you.
Finally I have that not just can equal but now surpasses my MiniDiscs!