Hi-fi streamers are an odd breed of device. Like it or not, most of them represent such low material value that if you were paying for the hardware alone they’d be a borderline scam. Most of the money you shell out on a high-end streamer pays for the software and the experience. The hardware is essentially a customised single-board computer like £50 Raspberry Pi. Many streamers use the Raspberry Pi compute module, quite literally a trimmed-down raspberry pi hardware platform on a daughter card designed to fit a custom motherboard. That motherboard will have some hardware inputs and outputs – a few USB inputs for storage devices perhaps, some digital audio inputs and / or outputs, and networking hardware. And in many cases the motherboard will include the internal DAC (digital to analogue converter) and its associated hardware and outputs. Still little to justify the huge cost of many streamers in hardware alone.
Turning to software, streamers fall into 1 of a few categories. Some run the manufacturer’s own platform. This gives the manufacturer complete control over the hardware, software and experience and generally results in a better product. WiiM, Arylic and Cambridge are examples of this. Some use a purpose-built commercial platform like Play-Fi or Undok, licensed from a software manufacturer. These can provide excellent experiences and give some interoperability with products from other brands, for example multi-room support across any brand of play-fi device. And some choose open-source platforms, either vanilla (the same software you can download onto a Raspberry Pi yourself) or an OEM distribution, like Ifi, Pro-Ject and Musical Fidelity use on their hardware. The aforementioned manufacturers all use an OEM derivative of Volumio. These solutions generally aren’t as well developed, implemented or supported, which doesn’t stop the costs for the devices being astronomical. The Neo from Ifi for example costs over £1200 for essentially the same user experience and quality of software you can install for free on your Raspberry Pi. Insane.
I’m turning increasingly to Chinese manufacturers for quality streaming. Arylic have the excellent Up2Stream platform with a number of streamers, streaming amps and DIY boards. And WiiM make the best value standalone streamers currently on the market with generous features, a fantastic app, great build quality and top-class sound. When FiiO entered the market with a $99 (approx. £95) streaming transport, I had to check one out.
The SR11 is a streaming transport. That is it has no internal DAC of its own and thus no analogue output. Instead it has coaxial and optical digital outputs, as well as a USB output. The USB output is something many streamers omit to their detriment. It means you can stream at the maximum supported resolution to any external DAC of your choice. The beating heart of any streamer is its software and any streaming software can be adapted to provide a USB output, so the fact most manufacturers don’t facilitate this is maddening. The new WiiM Ultra reportedly does, as do streamers based on the Volumio or MoOdeAudio software, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
The SR11 is a neat little box comprising a unibody aluminium shell with plastic rubberised base. On the front is the power button, control knob and display. On the back is an ethernet jack and wifi antenna, USB C ports for power and audio output, coaxial and optical digital outputs and a USB A port. The latter supports mass-storage devices currently only for software updates, with mass-storage file support potentially coming in a future update. The USB A port can also be used as a USB audio output.
The SR11 is Roon Ready and supports Apple AirPlay though not AirPlay 2. It is also UPNP capable. At launch a beta firmware package was required to enable UPNP support but this no-longer seems to be the case with the current firmware. Consequently it can stream directly with software such as Foobar2000 on both Windows and MacOS. I have not tested the Roon functionality as I don’t own a license. I’m not paying, monthly, twice the cost of a streaming subscription for a glorified media player that won’t sound better than any other media player.
UPNP support was not initially available by default. FiiO said at the time: “DLNA builds upon the UPnP protocol to enable media content sharing between different devices. Android devices typically use DLNA technology for screen casting and playback. However, due to Android system policies, certain music apps may experience compatibility issues during prolonged playback. Thus, the official firmware for the SR11 does not include DLNA functionality.”. That said I recently updated to the latest firmware and the UPNP functionality now appears to have been implemented. If yours didn’t ship with the latest firmware, the current version is available for download from the SR11 product page on the FiiO website.
Under the hood is an X2000 multi-core processor and AP6256 wifi chip, which supports dual-band wireless AC with seamless roaming. It also supports Bluetooth 5.2 which would allow the addition of Bluetooth audio streaming in a future firmware update. The ethernet port is gigabit, which seems a strange thing to highlight in 2024 but amazingly is rare in a hi-fi streamer. Most are still rocking good old 100 base-t networking with a maximum 100 megabits (10 megabytes) bandwidth. Often their wifi support is faster! Props to FiiO for this.
The X2000 is a multi-CPU heterogeneous multi-app micro-processor by Ingenic Inc. It includes 2 CPU cores – an XBurst2 (a MIPS based Ingenic CPU core, which can be configured to work as two logic CPUs) and an XBurst0 (another Ingenic MIPS based CPU core). The X2000 brings the computing capacity of application processors with the realtime control ability and outstanding power efficiency of a microcontroller.
The X2000 is a system on a chip (SOC) and has 128MB LPDDR3 on-chip RAM so a Linux based application can run on it. FiiO don’t specify the precise chip model but it could have as much as 512MB of RAM if they’re using the H variant, and 256 if they’re using the X2000E. They are pin-compatible, so could be substituted in production if future models need more resources to expand functionality. The chip directly implements USB, RGMII, GPIO, SSI, UART and even the audio interfaces with an on-chip ADC and DAC, 3 I2S ports, PCM and S/PDIF. It even has interfaces to connect up to 3 cameras simultaneously, and 2 of them can be hardware synchronised, and integrates a video processor and two image signal processors with support for H.264 coding/encoding and image manipulation. Imaging capabilities don’t apply to an audio streamer, but could potentially be leveraged in some cases for some on-device encoding of online video streams (podcasts from Youtube for example) or audio streaming from optical media.
It’s quite a powerful little chip and ideal in a low-powered streaming receiver. It’s not as powerful as the quad-core ARM SOCs found in most streamers, but most streamers rarely take full advantage of the power they’re packing. The SR11 has them soundly beaten in power efficiency and speed if not in features.
The SR11 comes with a user guide, warranty card and USB power supply. It is also provided with a remote control which is a very nicely made unit with large, responsive tactile buttons. It is an infra-red control though, so unlike the WiiM Bluetooth remote control it will need line of sight to the SR11. You also get a USB C to A power cable in the box.
Setup is straight forward. If you’re using a wired network you need only connect the ethernet cable and power up. To connect wirelessly, you power up the SR11, hold the knob to enter the menu and select the ‘network’ option. Select ‘y’ and the unit will enter hotspot mode. You then connect to the SR11 using a phone, tablet or computer, and point the browser to 192.168.1.1 at which point you can choose your network and enter your credentials. The wired connection takes priority and will be used by default if connected.
You then choose your output by returning to the setup menu, selecting ‘output’ and then selecting the desired option. I chose ‘USB” as I’ll be connecting to my Topping D90LE DAC via USB. There are a few other settings that can be adjusted pertaining mostly to the display.
This is where the limitations of the SR11 begin to show. It is about as basic as a streaming transport gets. It’s an AIrPlay, UPNP and Roon streamer. Only via UPNP it supports streaming directly from Foobar 2000, Windows Media Player, Tidal, Qobuz and other media streaming apps. It has no control app or interface of its own, instead relying exclusively on the transport control of your chosen app and the tiny screen and control knob to adjust settings. You don’t get Bluetooth streaming in or out, on-device internet radio, Spotify Connect, Chromecast Audio, Alexa / Google Home, HomeKit integration, native support for Amazon Music, default support for DLNA media servers, or support for mass-storage devices connected via USB. Some of that is supposed to be on the way in future firmware updates.
You don’t even get a browser interface to adjust the settings. Given that the browser interface exists to connect the unit to a wifi network, it wouldn’t be a stretch to include a basic interface to control the SR11 from a browser. And there is no facility to perform firmware updates over the network, only via a USB storage device. The on-device menu works fine but is reminiscent of ancient appliances from the days when tiny screens with minimalistic controls were all the rage.
For the SR11 to be a real competitor it needs to be more feature rich. On-device internet radio, default DLNA / UPNP and Spotify Connect are essential must-have features these days. and I’d encourage FiiO implement those as soon as possible. Along with a web interface to control them and the SR11. The SR11 faces tough competition from the WiiM Mini which is cheaper, has more powerful hardware and includes a lot of extra features, including Amazon Alexa support. It even has an optical output. What it can’t do, however, is output full-resolution audio via the USB output to your external DAC.
I won’t waste words describing its sound because it doesn’t have one. It’s a digital device that transports digital audio to your DAC and does nothing else to it. The sound you’ll get depends on your input source, your file type, codec and resolution and the DAC you use. People who think ethernet sound better than wifi, or that there is a meaningful yet immeasurable difference between USB cables will I’m sure find something to say about the FiiO’s ‘sound signature’. But in the real world it’s a bridge to decode digital information and supply it to a DAC in a format that it can understand. If you loaded a file into Foobar2000 containing a test tone or noise sample, and used the SR11 to stream it to a measurably transparent DAC like the Topping D90, the result measured at the analogue output of the DAC would be indistinguishable from the original file.
The SR11 is a great piece of hardware and for basic streaming needs, especially for those of us in the Apple ecosystem who use AirPlay, it is a great way to interface your devices with a DAC of your choice. If FiiO developed the software to the standard of a WiiM Mini, but kept to the streaming transport format (I.E a simple bridging device with no DAC of its own) they’d have the kind of streaming transport that many are looking for at a far more sensible price than the current streaming bridges on the market.
