So cool! This player is so cool. It looks fabulous, the spinning album art is genius. I have mine on all the time battery life be danned. The sound quality is as good as anything I have owned. You do need some good headphones to get the full benefit. Not crazy good but more than your basic model. So far I have 2 things don't don't make me happy about this unit. Fortunately they are both software related so they might be fixed one day. You can not play your music by album. You can play by folder if your organize your music that way. They other issue is it can't use .m3u files (playlists). It will let you create your own on the device but it won't read the ones you have already created. I have big playlists, they took a long time to create. The lack of album and playlist support is disappointing but it isn't enough to stop me from really enjoying this DAP, fingers crossed for that update. Speaking of updates, there was one out there that you need to install manually. After that it can do over the air updates. The Bluetooth music quality is the best I have heard although I mostly use a corded solution. My phone with an external DAP was good but this is better. Read more
Real talk here. This thing fails in so many ways. Ignore the glowing reviews you'll find in so many places. This device has major issues with tags, the UI, and navigation. Tags don't seem to work at all on ogg files. Albums and artists are two different sections. You can't pick an artist and then look at their albums. There is no nesting in the UI. So, unless you've memorized the name of every album you have on the device... good luck. Any title that appears at the bottom of a list, gets cut off on the bottom of the screen. You literally won't be able to read the very last artists name. The design is cool and the aluminum case looks nice, but the back is cheap clacky plastic. Such a missed opportunity. Read more
As someone who was growing up right during the mainstream transition from Portable CD Players to MP3 and DAPs, this thing is basically aimed squarely at my nostalgia. It's an itty-bitty DAP in CD Player cosplay. Very cute. While most of the world (myself included, obviously) has moved to using their smartphone for everything, a few of us still get that itch for the feel of using single-function devices that are thoughtfully-designed and perform well. This player does a pretty good job at that. For starters: It starts reasonably quickly. You get a little boot screen and are dumped into a simple interface. If you've used just about any "off-brand" (read: not iPod or Zune) DAP it should feel pretty familiar, and not in a bad way. The device scans SD cards quickly as well (remember waiting for old Sansa players? Yeah, none of that here), though I did have to re-initiate a scan once because getting the SD card into the little slot was a little fiddly and it decided to initiate the scan before I had it secured. The interface, while a little rough around the edges, does its job admirably. No 10 FPS animations of icons moving across the screen and waiting for menus to load here. Fiio did a lovely job, though there are a few little issues that should (hopefully) be easy to resolve. Some options leave you wondering why they bothered making a separate category for them. The "Streaming" menu only contains AirPlay, so why not just call it AirPlay? I feel like "Categories" is a little ambiguous and should've just been named Library. I'd love a little more customization also. There's a clock-like lock screen which would be nice to have the option to disable or even to change the look of. I also would like to see the track I was last playing persist when the device resumes from a power-off state, as how it is now it loads an empty Now Playing screen if you go directly there. Other areas would probably benefit from some small amount of memory as well, like the specific album or artist you were last on when you're browsing your library. A few other nice to haves I would love to see: The amount of "kinetic" scrolling is not great, so while we have a touch-screen device which is great for larger music libraries, scrolling through them still takes a lot longer than is ideal. I'd love to see more ability to flick-scroll through long lists of Albums, Artists and Tracks etc. Another useful method for getting through long lists would be to implement a mode where running your finger around the edge of the screen quickly moves through lists or categories (yes, like the iPod click wheel). This would make getting around libraries a lot faster and easier. Also on a much sillier note I think it would be fun to have a speed control for the rotating album-art, with the ability to set it to be a little faster for a more "CD Player" like feel. A bit unnecessary perhaps, but so is the entire device by that measure. Have a little fun with it. As for sound, I'll start by saying I am by no means an audiophile. I am not particularly picky about sound quality. I don't notice much if any difference between a FLAC and a 320kbps MP3, but I am at least discerning enough that I don't like to hear noise when I shouldn't, and I have little to no tolerance for devices so slow they can't even play good quality music files when we've been able to do that competently for the last 20+ years. Far as I can tell? It's good. From a purely technical standpoint there are really no issues. I didn't notice any background hiss or hum, tracks load up just fine and don't stutter, and the player doesn't seem to get bogged down playing higher-quality tracks like some more anemic players might. That all said, there are a few things I would like to see added here as well. With such a nice-sized screen the omission of a parametric/graphical EQ seems like a real missed opportunity. Heck even my old CD Walkman has one of those, and Sony did that on a tiny monochrome LCD (in a cave, with a box of scraps). I would also like to see more descriptions of some of the options. There are filters and settings which I don't really understand what they do, and this isn't explained in the manual or anywhere else online as far as I can see. This also leads to the only real audio "glitch" I've noticed thus far: Swapping filters seems to apply to one ear before the other. I suspect this is due to the dual DAC setup (as I understand it left and right channels each use their own), but it was a little jarring the first time you hear it, making you wonder if you might have broken something. I doubt that's something you're going to be fiddling with very often, so hardly a deal-breaking issue, just something I noticed. Overall though, I really am liking this cute little player. DAPs really seem to be squarely in the rear-view mirror of the cultural landscape, and finding ones that are a good price and good quality that focus on simply being a DAP instead of just a smartphone without a cellular radio has become increasingly difficult. For likely less than what you'd spend buying an iPod and modding it, this device strikes a good balance between being simple and importing some of those modern creature comforts we take for granted that make a device easy to live with day-to-day. I'd say it's a pretty good deal. Edit 3/1/26: I am apparently a little blind! After playing around with the device a little more, a few of the issues I had actually are options, I just missed them. The lock screen can in fact be changed between a few different styles (though disabling it isn't an option). They're... not the greatest styles, just the same style digital clock with a few different background images, but I like at least one or two of them more than the default analog clock. Second and most importantly: The player actually can resume your last song when powering on, either at the specific position or the beginning of the last played song, you just have to activate one of these modes in Settings > Playback Settings > Memory Playback. In either of these modes the player immediately begins playback when you turn it on, which may or may not be what you want, but it's certainly easier than digging back to what you were listening to. I'll also mirror the sentiment another reviewer made that navigating to an artist should really take you to a list of albums by that artist instead of just a giant list of tracks, and it would also be nice to have actual previews of album art in many of these lists as well. Additionally, I did notice at least one text encoding error with song information (specifically the artist Bôa does not display correctly), but at the very least the player displays East Asian language characters well, which I guess shouldn't be very surprising. There are certainly some things to work on, the player definitely isn't free from the "jank" exhibited by many of these smaller brand players, but overall I am still quite pleased, and it's definitely a step up from the smaller-brand players of yesteryear. Read more
Greetings: I had a M21 for a bit and found it to be bulky and frankly was disappointed with the DAC for my car audio use. I wrote a review for it that is on the M21 product 4/5 stars. This little wonder device is shocking easy to use and to flick through the menus to find what you want quickly. The size is PERFECT, one hand operation The sound quality in DAC mode sounds fantastic. Bluetooth connected to my car stereo, my air buds and my BT speaker with ease The design is so well thought out, the ability to hold it in your palm and navigate is just superb. Battery life if I have it not display the spinning record or cover art is about 6 hours which is perfect acceptable.Charging through USB C takes about 35 minutes from 0- 100%. The functionality of the player is simple and easy to master without reading a thing. I am very happy with this purchase. Read more
