In The Beginning
When I were a wee lad I had a personal stereo. That’s a tape cassette player running on AA batteries. I loved it. It was great, though it would be many years before I could afford a real WalkMan.
Then I had a MiniDisc player - I missed out portable CD players completely - and a while later I owned a few iPods.
Then, like a lot of other people, I just put a few albums on my phone, and then, well, thought ’let’s just stream!'
I still had all those CDs though, ripped to .flac format, sat on some spinning rust and that was how I listened to music at home - through acceptable desktop speakers on my Linux desktop, or via a real amp in the living room, hooked up to my Pi4 running LibreElec. I liked it - sit sounded good, and it does what I want.
Eventually, I kind of wanted this sort of experience, of listening to all the CDs I owned, on the go. I couldn’t quite fit all my music (85+ GB) on my phone and still have space for photos etc., so what could I do? I mean, there’s no iPods any more, right?
However …
What I’d completely lost track of was that Digital Audio Players or DAPs were still a thing, and the market was doing very nicely, thank you very much.
A lot have evolved into high end, high definition audio players, some running Android, looked liked smartphones, but you know, without the phones, and didn’t cost far off either with their specialist DACs and amps.
Almost all of them had headphone jacks - for real, cabled headphones.
All also had multiple subreddits, and generally it looked like a healthy ecosystem.
Dipping the Toe
I looked around, I read reviews, I followed subreddits - I set myself a very small budget as this was still kind of a proof of concept. Eventually I found the Echo Mini by Fiio (or rather their Snowsky sub-brand). It was just what I wanted - small, light, played flac and other file types. It also had no touch screen and kind of looked like a shrunken cassette or Walkman. SOLD!
I first ordered this from a Choice seller on AliExpress. It never turned up. I got a refund, then I spent an extra 10% and bought a Titanium Gold version from Amazon Japan.
The Echo Mini
It arrived and indeed it was tiny. I shoved in a 256GB microSD card with all my music and audio in flac format on it and fired it up.
Playing into my also recently purchased cabled Truthear Zero:Red Inner Ear Monitors (IEMs) the Mini sounds absolutely fantastic. Very detailed, very neutral, and so small and light you could kind of forget about it and just melt into that music like a tuna melt for brunch.
I’d noticed that more and more I wanted to go back to listening to whole albums. With the Mini DAP, I was all the way back to that and it has been great.
There’s no touch screens, just a few buttons and a barebones UI and it’s great. Mostly, I’m just pressing play and listening. On my commute it’s been great - I don’t get my phone out, I’m not distracted, I’m just listening to my music and it sounds great.
The Echo Mini also has a 4.4mm jack for balanced headphones. That’s something I didn’t know was a thing for sure, but after reading up online about it, apparently it is. I don’t have any of these balaned headphones, but now I have the thought in my mind that I should probably pick some up so to let me hear how different they are.
You charge it and copy data to it via USB C, which is expected nowadays of course. It also has 8GB of built in memory, so if you’re using MP3 or AAC, you could get quite a lot of music on there before adding the SD card. As it is, that internal storage is empty on mine, and only used for dropping on the firmware update files, which seem to come out fairly regularly.
Though my main personal usage case is wired listening, the Echo Mini has good Bluetooth support. However, behind the big Bluetooth version number (5.3), it only supports the very basic SBC codec. It’s well supported codec, but it’s barely (and arguably not) CD quality, so if you’re going to be mostly listening via BT earbuds or headphones it might not be worth putting all those flac files on there, especially given the cost of SD cards these days.
Despite how small and basic it is, it has a lot of settings for oversampling and such, which I’ve just kind of left as-is. So using that as an intro, let’s look at a few downsides. These fall into two categories: things I knew before I bought, and some things I found out later.
I knew it didn’t have gapless playback. It seems that’s a technical limitation due to the amount of onboard RAM, but it’s an odd ommission in 2026. The upshot is that there’s always ~0.5 seconds of silence between tracks. I can’t say it annoys me, but it is noticeable on those tracks which link or connect to each other.
Chewing the FAT
The larger issue I hadn’t taken account of is that cheaper DAPs often don’t use a lot of tagged information such as from ID3 or Vorbis Comments and don’t have a lot of horsepower dedicated to manipulating that kind of information. On top of that, they use *FAT file system based storage (FAT32, ExFAT etc.). Why does that matter? Well, they sometimes don’t care if a file in a folder starts with the number ‘1’ as the first track for example, and instead will just look at the order in which the files in the folder were written to disk. With many OSs, files are not copied to the SD card sequentially in order as multiple threads might copy and she quicker finishes first, and so you see files in a kind of random order. Sometimes.
It turned out to actually be more annoying than I thought. I looked around for ways to fix this, and there some apps, mostly built around the FATsort library. Sadly, they didn’t work for me out of the box so I eventually went very manual and vibe coded a script which completed one file copy before starting another. That worked, but I’m sure something FATsort based is better, so I’ll go back and look into that.
I was wondering why this seemed like a solved issue 20 years ago with iPods, but I suspect they used Apple’s HFS+, and of course iTunes managed the transfers so any issues were managed there.
In Conclusion
So I’ve had this for almost a month now, and I’m really pleased with it as a device. It’s doing exactly what I wanted - giving me access to all my music at its original CD quality level wherever I wanted. It’s even got a few bonus features I never planned on, such as being usable as a DAC for my laptop, and it is very usable in that way too.
Build quality is good for the money, so it’s just fairly rigid plastic. It’s all very basic in a good way, and focusses on what I want it to do. Listen to music.