Portable Music Player of the Year
What is the point of a personal and portable music player when every smartphone can carry vast quantities of stored music or deliver infinite tunes via streaming? Quality is the answer, and particularly for those with a high-res music collection. Smartphones are not dedicated music machines, so it’s not hard for a carefully-designed PMP to outperform their DACs and headphone outputs (if they even have one), while many, including the M11 here, are also able to provide useful service at home, either playing music directly into a full sound system, or working as a DAC for other sources.
When compared to other Fiio DAPs like the M9, the M11 is thicker and heavier, but diving into its parts explains why. Socketry is generous: it has two microSD slots, so with 2TB cards is able to carry up to 4TB of high-res music, along with 32GB of internal storage (26GB actually usable). There’s a standard 3.5mm minijack headphone output but also 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs, and USB-C for both charging and playback. The minijack can operate at line level and is actually a combo digital connector (adaptor provided), so you can plug the M11 into a full hi-fi several ways. The 5-inch display has 720p resolution, making operation a breeze.
Inside, the M11 runs on a Samsung Exynos 7872 processor, a mid-range chipset as used in some 2018 smartphones, but here dedicated entirely to making music, combined with dual AK4493EQ DACs doing the audio conversion. The M11 runs on Android 7.0 Nougat, albeit in a slightly neutered form because, as with other Fiios, there is no Google Play Store from which to download apps. Instead, Fiio has its own market which includes several popular music and streaming apps: Tidal, Spotify, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer and TuneIn, (also Qobuz, not yet available here).
At home the M11 supports both 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi signals, and with AirPlay enabled the M11 becomes a receiver to playback audio from an iOS device or Mac computer. There’s Bluetooth available as well, both outward for wireless headphones or speakers, and inward for playback, covering aptX, aptX HD and LDAC, though not Apple’s preferred AAC (so use that AirPlay option). AAC is supported from card or DLNA/UPnP network streaming, along with pretty much everything else, with PCM up to 32-bit/384kHz and DSD to DSD512.
The Android experience also extends to a Chrome browser, via which we played videos from YouTube and Netflix. It’s a small screen, for sure, and Netflix wouldn’t deliver HD, but it worked! Fiio has also at last included over-the-air firmware updates, rather than from memory card.
And, as with all Fiio players, audio quality was excellent, with the drive to handle even difficult headphones. In line-out mode, the distortion is a vanishingly low 0.001%. Battery life is quoted at 13 hours, less for wireless playback, but given this is a player capable of use at home and away, with great sound, features, DAC abilities and networking, the value is clear, and the case for owning a PMP well made by the $799 Fiio M11.
More info: www.addictedtoaudio.com.au