Fiio To Change Naming Convention of Future DAPs

Ever since Fiio’s very first DAP, the original X3, the model name of their portable music players always had the “X” prefix. That was until they brought out the M3 and more recent M7, but their X-series were always their most important players. 

What’s In A Name, Fiio?

So, why is there a need to change the naming convention of future models? Well, the answer isn’t 100% clear, as the explanation given via a social media post was a document that was translated into English by what seems to be some automated system (Google Translate perhaps).

Basically it seems to come down confusion on the part of customers, and varying requirements in terms of online listings for various online retailers.
Fiio used a similar naming-scheme to what Apple has been doing, in the sense that each model essentially has 2 model names. The first would be the one that is prefixed with an “X”, such as X7, X5, etc. Then there’s also the model name which is used internally by Fiio (i.e FX3321 for the X3 Mark III). Some retailers (TMall in China) require the use of the official model name (i.e the internal model name), which can be pretty confusing as most consumers (especially those outside of China) would only know the device by it’s more popular “X” prefixed name.
As such, Fiio will from now on be using the same model names internally and within the international market, but all future device model numbers with have the “M” prefix instead of “X”.

If you’d like to read the more official statement that was put out by Fiio directly on Facebook, feel free to check out the post here.

Hopefully this will clear up some of the apparent confusion experienced by customer, but it’ll be interesting to see what the names of the “replacements” for the X3-series, X5-series, and X7-series will be.