At CanJam New York in 2025, a FiiO rep handed the reviewer Wavetheory a pair of FT7 headphones in the middle of a walkway, and all he had in his hand was an iBasso portable player. The bass went missing. When a spot opened at FiiO's table he moved the same headphones to a K17 desktop DAC and amplifier, the sound came right, and he asked for a review pair. FiiO makes headphones, players and desktop DAC-amplifiers, and Joshua Valour thinks it is building an ecosystem, since the FT1 ships with a balanced cable that plugs straight into a K11 R2R. The desktop units bring flagship parts down to modest prices. John E. Johnson Jr. of Secrets of Home Theater and High Fidelity notes that the K17 costs far less than other DACs built on the same AKM chips, and Passion for Sound found it "as good or better than any of the competition on the market around the price". FiiO suits headphone listeners who want balanced outputs and streaming in a first serious desktop system.

For a first desktop unit, Joe of Gadgetry Tech recommends the K11, because its digital volume control keeps the two channels even at low volume with sensitive earphones, and he suggests changing the default digital filter. If you want a warmer sound, the K11 R2R converts with a ladder of switched resistors, and MajorHiFi hears it as neutral-warm. The K17 is the big step up. Currawong calls the K15 the better bargain, giving up a little power to the K17, and sends classical listeners with higher-end headphones to the K17. For headphones, Valour found the closed-back FT1 "shockingly good for the money", and What Hi-Fi? found the open-back FT3 "pleasant, unchallenging and easy to listen to". If you choose the FT3, try both sets of pads, since What Hi-Fi? heard it leaner on the leather ones than on the suede. The planar FT7 wants a desktop amplifier, as Wavetheory found.

James Chung fell for music at college in 1980s China, playing Michael Jackson on a Walkman, and a classmate's AIWA Walkman from Hong Kong was the first high-quality music device he had heard. He left OPPO in 2006, and FiiO's first product, in 2007, was the PS1120, a dock speaker for the Meizu MP3 player. The name joins Fi from fidelity with the 1 and 0 of digital. Chung's method was to launch a "price-friendly product to do a market trial" and then build a line upward, shaped by long hours with users on Head-Fi. The E-series headphone amplifiers made the name, then came the X3 of 2013, FiiO's first player, with 24-bit/192 kHz playback for $200, almost a third of an AK100's price. Headfonics called FiiO the "bang-for-buck kings" and in 2016 counted a new product every two or three months. FiiO grew from around ten people in 2009 to more than 300 by its own 2023 count, still in Guangzhou, and in 2024 What Hi-Fi? reviewed the FT3 as the brand's first over-ear headphone.