FiiO BTR3k Balanced HiFi Bluetooth Amp

Product Information

Overall tonality is flat and natural with a slight hint of warmth as we are accustomed to FiiO's house sound and AKM velvet dacs. Right off the bat, you’ll notice the obvious elephant in the room – the BTR5 has a lot more power than the 3K. When our team measured the FiiO BTR3K, we were greeted with a remarkably flat frequency response that was equally as flat in Bluetooth mode and USB DAC mode – making this BT amp, also, a ridiculously tiny external USB DAC that can offer excellent performance.

Using Bluetooth with my phone worked very well without any dropped connections, it did a good job sound quality wise. Using the BTR5 2021 with my PC thru Type C to USB, Both my ER2SE and Audio Technica Pro5X worked very good and sound really nice. Pairing the device with my phone was easy since it was effortless to put it in pairing mode and it connected right away to my phone, While the phone it self will handle the primary volume, it's best to set the volume BT volume to max, so the BTR5 2021 will handle the actual volume with the controls. When in USB mode with the included lighting to type C cable, the phone volume controls are disabled and the devices handles the volume completely. Blue tooth audio sound good enough from my iPhone, but it’s limited to AAC and doesn’t sound as good as wired. So I blame my phone for that and not the BTR5 2021.The device does get a little warm during use, no problems from that, other then keeping your hand warm.

While finishing this review FiiO released a brand new application specially designed to control all FiiO bluetooth products.

Some of them include turning charging mode on/off , selecting the low pass filter , enabling various user configurable equaliser modes , altering idle time power off etc. Now the HiFiMAN HE-560 sound okay-ish with the BTR3K; the volume is limited and there’s also limited physicality. With easier-to-drive headphones and earphones the situation is much better and there are no specific issues.

Please note that my review below will mainly on my sound experiences with the 2.5mm Balanced output. BTR3K hits really hard with Pro 82 v2, and the bass has full body - really surprising for such a tiny device. This feature plus a few others can be accessed through FiiO's music app available for Android and iOS.