While iTunes is popular, you might not use it because you want to listen to high-resolution music files, or files in formats that iTunes doesn’t support. That also means you use a portable music player that isn’t iOS based but is capable of handling a wider range of files, including high-resolution. Audio files of this type are often distributed in FLAC format (though it’s easy to convert FLAC files to Apple Lossless files and use them in iTunes), or even Direct Stream Digital (DSD) files (a format created for Super Audio CDs, and now sold as downloads from some vendors), which offer an even higher resolution than what’s available in more common formats.
A number of portable audio players support these audio files, and Fiio, a Chinese company with a solid reputation for low-cost, high-quality audio hardware, has a full range of such devices. The latest is the Fiio X7 ($769 MSRP, $600 on Amazon), an Android-based device that supports nearly all the commonly used audio formats: MP3, AAC, FLAC, Apple Lossless, WMA, WAV, AIFF, APE, and OGG at sampling rates up to 384kHz and up to 64-bit resolution, as well as DSD up to 5.6MHz.
Read the rest of the article on Macworld.