FiiO Snowsky Retro Nano Review

In this review, I’m taking the cheerful FiiO Snowsky Retro Nano dongle for a whirl. The unit costs $60 USD. 

Disclaimer: FiiO is not related to Headfonia. They sent me the Retro Nano free of charge to be featured on Headfonia.com.

FiiO Snowsky

Snowsky is FiiO’s latest venture in creating a sub-brand offering a distinct product line. Previously, they’ve created Jade, a sub-brand for their more value offerings; however, to me, it never seemed like the brand took off. Snowsky is similar in that it offers affordable, youthful, and fun products, but now FiiO sprinkles a bit of nostalgia-bait on them for good measure.

Kids like cassettes, right?

Snowsky Retro Nano

When I got the package for the Snowsky Retro Nano, I was pretty surprised by its weight. As a reviewer, I sometimes get sent extra stuff by mistake or otherwise, but in this case, there was only the Retro Nano and a whole plethora of FiiO’s Chinese New Year swag. The brunt of the weight was the humongous FiiO vinyl player medallion. As for the DAC/amp itself, it ships in a pretty budget-looking package. You also get a few stickers to make it more similar to a cassette.

Naturally, I didn’t trust my hands to align the stickers properly, so my Retro Nano was kept vanilla, with no stickers applied. Very punk, I know. 

On paper, the Snowsky Retro Nano is a budget DAC/amp. The pitch here is threefold – it only costs 60 bucks, there’s a screen that can be made to look like a cassette, and it runs on a single replaceable 350mAh 10440 lithium cell. While the cell resembles a regular AAA cell, please don’t attempt to use one for the Retro Nano.

The lithium cell provides 3.7VDC, so the AAA will fall short with its puny 1.5VDC. You can buy extra 10440 cells for about 3 bucks a pop, but do be careful when carrying them. A lithium cell will happily cook off if shorted, so make sure it’s not brushing against anything conductive. 

The Retro Nano also features a 10-band PEQ that can be tuned via the Android or Apple mobile app or via the computer through a browser-based app which I found a bit glitchy. Your EQ profiles can be stored and shared with the rest of the FiiO user community.

A well-tuned profile can be a powerful tool to rescue ill-sounding headphones and even many speaker systems if measurement-based corrections are used. The PEQ capability can be used with both Bluetooth and USB-C connections.

Together with the Retro Nano, we get a rather basic set of accessories – a short USB-C to USB-C cable, a lanyard so you can hang the dongle on your neck, and a small bag of silica gel pebbles if you’re feeling peckish (please don’t). The only thing that’s missing would be a longer USB cable for charging because the shorty will only work for phone dongle duty.

I like that the lithium cell is in a plastic case, which is the correct way to store them. The FiiO Snowsky Retro Nano can be bought from FiiO’s Amazon store and other retailers.

Features:

• Up to 16bit 96kHz PCM
• Bluetooth 5.1 – LDAC/aptX-Adaptive/aptX/aptX HD/AAC/SBC
• Inputs – USB-C and Bluetooth
• Outputs – 3.5mm TRRS (mic + controls), 4.4mm TRRRS
• SNR – 128dBA (BAL), 125dBA (SE) (well below audibility)
• THD+N – ＜0.0018% (1kHz/-4dB@32Ω) (generally inaudible)
• Max output voltage – 5Vpp (SE), 7.5Vpp (BAL)
• Output power (SE) – 120mW@16ohms, 100mW@32ohms, 10mW@300ohms
• Output power (BAL) – 130mW@16ohms, 220mW@32ohms, 55mW@300ohms
• Output impedance – <0.3ohms
• 60-step digital volume control
• High and low gain
• 10-band PEQ, supports peak, low/high-pass, bandpass, low/high-shelf, and allpass
• Remote

Design, Build & Haptics

After a cursory glance at the Snowsky Retro Nano, one can be forgiven to think that FiiO have gone after the cassette-punk nostalgia vibe. From FiiO’s own stable, the Retro Nano looks quite like the KA15, their current mid-budget Blue-toothless dongle, which sports a similar all-plastic body and a screen with similar cassette-inspired graphics.

Me? I see something different. Remember the era when mp3 players roamed the earth after driving mp3-capable CD players to extinction? A friend of mine had a Creative Zen Nano player, which sported a very similar design and ran on a single AAA cell. That thing was always chock-full of Korn, Slipknot, and Static-X. And we both had skate shoes, wide pants, and an attitude to match…

On one hand, technically, the Retro Nano has nothing to write home about. It’s a battery-operated, dual-CS43131, and QCC5125-equipped Bluetooth dongle. I’ve heard dozens of similar implementations. But for 60 dollars? Erm… It’s very good actually! Unheard of, really. And it has a user-swappable lithium power cell?

I never expected such consumer-friendly design in this day and age! The 10-band PEQ is the perfect cherry on top. The dual chip architecture also allows for a true-balanced output from the 4.4mm jack for extra power and voltage on tap.

The build of the Snowsky Retro Nano is plastic-fantastic, in other words, very on-brand! Even with the power cell inside, the device is quite light, so it’s likely that it will survive drops without much damage, save for some scratches. The top portion of the Retro Nano has four push-buttons and the power toggle switch which allows me to feel whether the device is on.

The pushbuttons offer the bare necessities like play/pause and volume control/skip track functions. Long-pressing the multi-function button enters the menu. Doing the same on the play/pause button will bring up your phone’s smart assistant or wirelessly trigger the shutter in the camera app.

The in-device menu is pretty bare-bones, and you’ll likely use it for two things: switching between PC, Bluetooth, and phone modes and choosing EQ profiles. There’s the regular choice of genre-based profiles and Retro, which emulates a cassette sound (it doesn’t!).

Cooking up custom profiles can be done via the smartphone app or through a web-based app if you’ve got the Retro Nano hooked up to a computer. The smartphone app worked best for me, as the web app was a bit testy. Hopefully, FiiO will fix it.

Sound Signature

My test setup: Sennheiser HD6XX, Moondrop Para, DCA Noire X, ZMF Auteur Classic, Maytak Audio M6, Softears Volume S, Letshuoer Mystic 8.

As always, practicalities first. No matter the output or gain mode, the Snowsky Retro Nano stayed silent with even the most sensitive IEMs I could find. High-ohmic loads like the Sennheiser HD600 ran plenty loud on low-gain max volume from the 3.5mm, so high-gain or balanced drive could be useful there.

It’s the same story with the 13-ohm DCA Noire X; I just had to bump the volume down to 55/60. Let’s see if the 8-ohm Moondrop Para can make it catch fire! No such luck. Of course, I could hear the output stage of the CS43131 struggling as the highs became quite harsh, and the bass was rather light.

The part on sound continues on the second page. Click here or use the jumps below.