Public Name—August 19, 2023✓ Verified purchase
This player makes my 66 ohm MACH 80 IEMs sound great. It also drives my 250 ohm DT 1770 cans without a problem. That may say more about Beyer than SHANLING though. A question that I had before buying the M7 was, 'how hot does it get?' Well, on the upside, the ridges on the sides help a little to minimize hand to device contact, and the covering on the back insulates it some. Other than that, a little extra warmth in the winter wont hurt. Fortunately, I discovered that it is not hard to ignore this much heat for this much audio quality. The same goes for its power consumption, its weight, and, to a certain extent, its pricetag. Anyway, the sound of this player is large and complete at low volume levels, and, of course, becomes larger and more complete when turned up. Once again, it doesn't need to be very loud to hear clearly defined and wide ranging detail, including the bass. This is the mark of excellence. It is ultra-clean, with a low fatigue factor. Read more
David O—April 30, 2023✓ Verified purchase
Summary: The Shanling M7 is a very very good Digital Audio Player (DAP) marred by software problems. Pros: Excellent hardware. Outstanding sound & build quality, crystal-clear balanced drive even with difficult-to-drive headphones. Good player UI, excellent Bluetooth performance in vehicles, OK battery life; and responsive tech support. Handles all the very high def audio formats without issues. Cons: Software bugs including serious album sort errors in their player app, and very very slow to update music library, and key missing features. Wanted to rate this 3.5 stars, but went with 4 as IMO it did not deserve a 3. If not for the software issues, this DAP would be a solid 5 stars. * Long version: After a month of heavy usage, and trading emails with a very responsive Shanling tech support, here is what I found. Long time music aficionado (some would say "music nut"), discerning DAP user coming from heavy use of multiple high-end DAPs. Have been looking for a replacement for Cowon Plenue 2 / Plenue L DAPs which have simply stunning, jaw-dropping audio with high def source, and the Cowons even make crappy MP3s sound really good. Tragically Cowon is no longer making these, and our Cowon DAPs have started to fail after many years of daily use. After a bit of simple usage & testing with the Shanling M6 Ultra, I liked that DAP so much I picked up this Shanling M7 for that extra increment of sound and power for those difficult-to-drive cans. Bluetooth operation across multiple vehicles is excellent including aptX, and all of the bi-directional features work flawlessly (track selection / forward backward, etc). But, really, you don't spend this kind of money to listen to insanely high quality audio over BT in a car... Here's the truly great part: Simply beautiful audio with wired connection, especially with excellent source (Chesky high def), and excellent cans (like Beyerdynamic T5 and Audeze LCD-X) with balanced drive. But - at some level - that is expected at this price point. But I'll say it again: Beautiful sound. Now for the not-so-good stuff. Music collection is currently ~4K albums, ~51K tracks. Yes, that's a lotta tunes. Like the M6 Ultra, It takes this player ~50 minutes to sort / index without embedded album cover images, and ~105 minutes to sort with album cover images. In comparison, Cowon players take ~5 minutes (without album art) and ~7 minutes (with album art) to index the exact same library with the exact same SD card. While this is annoying, it is not a deal-breaker for me. The really serious issue is an album sort issue in the Shanling player app. Instead of artist / album / track sorting like a. is expected, and b. other players do, it only sorts on artist / album. What does this mean? As an example this means that all the tracks from different "Greatest Hits" albums from different artists get lumped into the same "album" regardless of artist - which they are definitely not. Shanling is aware of this problem and acknowledges it, and had no estimate as to when a fix would be available in their player app. Shanling's tech support's suggested workaround is to rename all your albums so that they are unique(!). Yikes. Ummm... No. Shanling's other tech support recommendation was to use another popular player app from a 3rd party. I installed that app (paid version), and it sorted all the artists / albums correctly. But that app was so miserably & unusably slow with this large music library. In addition to the slowness during simple use, there were also privacy concerns with that 3rd party app as well; and am not using it. A key missing feature is gapless play, which is kind of a given on DAPs. Shanling acknowledged this, said that they are planning to add this feature at some point, but had no date. Another key missing feature is less-than-track skip (e.g. skip 5 / 15 / 30 seconds). Every other DAP that I have used can do this. This is really handy when listening to audio books & lectures. Shanling said that they have no plans to add this feature to their player app. At the end of all this, the album sort issue is a real deal breaker for me. And I know it may not be for others... but in addition to the other issues balanced the scale the wrong way for me. This is a really good player, but for my part will keep looking for a worthy Cowon DAP replacement. Also see my Shanling M6 Ultra review. Read more
