recently switched from a magni 3 / modi 2 stack to the Fiio K7, along with snagging my first pair of enthusiast IEMs so i figured id give my uneducated opinion on both

first with the K7, its great honestly. i dont use any of the output features, just as an all in one amp dac so keep that in mind. in my opinion it sounds slightly better than the schiit stack, along with being more convenient for my personal setup. no RCAs and not as tall.

now onto the Salnotes Zero. decided to just try them out as i haven’t had IEMs in years, and my first impressions are pretty good. they’re not gonna have you floating feeling like you’re ascending into heaven, but for $20 they’re really solid and a good introduction for people getting into the hobby. solid bass response and generally sound pretty clear.

The K7 is a brilliant bit of kit.

The K7 is a really tempting purchase, but I unfortunately don't have room for it. I am currently using an Asus Zephryus G14 Gaming laptop as my daily driver and it only has 2 USB-A ports. One of them is occupied to an hard drive dock and the other is plugged in as a hub to the Samsung Odyssey Neo G9. There is no chance in hell that I am plugging the K7 or the hard drive dock to the Neo G9's USB Hub. I am just going to have to wait until I can build my desktop PC.

Unless the K7 can use a USB-B to USB-C cable on their USB port, then I may be able to use it since I have a usb-c port to spare

The selling point for me on the K7 is that it has a 4.4mm balanced jack...a perfect place to plug in my HD800S

Edit: Turns out it can accept USB-B to USB-C cable since the K7 can be used with mobile phones too. I will wait for it to be on sale since I already purchased a Neo G9 during Black Friday

7HZ Salnotes Zero or Moondrop Quarks DSP or Tangzu Wan'er?

Rocking a K5 pro ESS and I really wonder how the K7 would compare.. But eh, quite happy about my little unit and what it can do. I'm guessing the ESS chip is what does most of the magic.

> Unless the K7 can use a USB-B to USB-C cable on their USB port, then I may be able to use it since I have a usb-c port to spare

Sure this should work.

Honestly the K7 seems quite a bit better than the K5~

On paper that is.

Ah well, paper and measurements mean basically nothing to me, as long as it sounds clean to me (I use my K5 as a DAC)

> (I use my K5 as a DAC)

Oh. Well, it has 90+ dB of signal to noise ratio, it should clear any real world requirement of a DAC. So I guess you don't need to upgrade. Not really.

Nice! Some people say there are huge differences in DACs but so far I haven't been able to notice that.. When something costs thousands it has to sound subjectively different I guess.

An well about amps, the FiiO K5 pro's amplification seems relatively clean to me, but my Xduoo TA-26 does a slighlty better job, lik 5-10%, depending on the genre of music I am listening to. Just fuller and more lifelike. Was it worth the money? Probably not.. but the slight improvement is very welcome.

It's super sick that the K7 costs so little while being so similiar to the K9 pro.

> Some people say there are huge differences in DACs but so far I haven't been able to notice that.. When something costs thousands it has to sound subjectively different I guess.

Yup. Same for me. I own an old 16-bit Sony TDA-based DAC and it rolls off highest frequency content a bit but other than that.. even an age old DAC sounds just about identical.

> my Xduoo TA-26 does a slighlty better job

I would hope so :)

Does the balanced jack sound different than the unbalanced on or does ist just give more power?