Shanling M2X Digital Audio Player - Titanium

Good sound quality and volume. Good user interface. The only downside was that initially mine came with the default Chinese language. I had to troll through YouTube to find that in the settings menu, the fourth from the bottom offered a whole heap of languages.

was going to go for another fillo but! had my eye on shanling for a while now, and am very happy with the build and quality of it.would stick with them it, if I would buy another Dac Player.

UPDATE 22-10-2020A new firmware version has been released by Shanling, v3.0. However, apart from adding some functionality (again horizontal expansion) it did not address the jittery scrolling or the coarse font, better wifi and BT drivers as well as the simple date format issue I have mentioned. This is disappointing as for such major version it should have been better.Also, the logic of navigating the screen and the nuisance to have to press 5-6 times back back back to get yo a root menu is becoming tiresome and annoying. Another glitch is that if you are listening to music and plug the player on charger in many cases it is not possible to use rhe player as the screen only displays a battery being charged. And this is not a safety or any other issue as it does this at 20, 50 or 80% charge. So, no excuse there...In Tidal app it does not show the song number like on a Tidal app on iPhone, iPad or android device.And last but not least, the actual buttons follow some strange Chinese developer logic. Example: I am listening to a track and I swipe to list. A logical button at the bottom would be “back” button. In this case there is just a word that says Off... and that is the logic that says that the list will be Off ;-)… same when downloading firmware... there is a word that says “No” ;-) (see pic)And again, the best thing about this little thing is the sound...—————————————————————-After some research I have decided to buy 2 audio players from 2 companies. One was the Shanling M2X and the other the Hidizs AP80.The packaging of the M2X is good, not Apple product good, but it came in a package nicely protected. Opening the box felt a bit “unnatural” as it made me rip parts of the carton to get to the box first and then the thin paper box where the cable was located was a bit tricky to open. Nothing to fret about, but first impressions count ;-)The unit was snugged in nicely and taking it out felt like holding something substantial. It is heavy, but not heavy as in uncomfortable, but heavy as in a good quality, solid piece of equipment. It felt sleek and shiny, polished to high gloss and gave the feeling of being “important, the gadget, not me ;-)The battery was completely discharged, so after reading from the back of the unit that it requires 5V 2A charge I opted to plug it into my apple iphone charger. It immediately came to life and after couple hours charging there was enough juice to start playing around with.The firmware it came with was V2.1 and it was jerky and the touch screen seemed off. I tried to upgrade kver the net, but that did not work, so I used the card to upgrade the firmware to V2.7. No difference in the layout, but the scrolling seemed smoother and faster (still with a bit of jitter and delay)After loading some FLACs, mp3s, SACDs and other formats it was time to test the sound. And what a sound it produces. Beautiful, full and detailed. Not imposing, just “there”... present, clear and rich. Since I have many gadgets in my house I have connected it to BT soundbar, my Sony WH-1000XM2, Some wired headphones, LG TV and it worked fine with all of them. Strangley, the poorest reproduction was on my Sony headphones ;-(There are things that I was not so happy about and would like to see them improved in future fw upgrades. Some are niggles and others are just a necessity. From the top of my head here is a list below:1. Date and time format to be introduced. It currently only supports US date and time format. Even cheaper devices have this option2. Improve scrolling, make it smoother and with a faster response3. Introduce scrolling or expansion on folders and files with longer names. I have an Archos from 15 years ago and it does that. Many folders start as eg. VA - audioxxx and then I am unable to read the rest as it does not expand. My car has a unit from 2014 and it gives me an arrow at the end of the screen to expand and see the full name of the folder or file4. Wifi is weak. Probably updated drivers are needed. Same goes for bluetooth where only few metres from the unit the sound is crackling and losing connection.All in all very bappy with the gadget. Definitely worth the money I have paid and I am looking forward to the upgrades and buying more from Shanling

Really nice product.Lovely simple GUI to use.Very good but not great audio but can't complain at this price and I can't afford the pricier options.Nice button layout, though the volume button is easily changed in your pocket and also the play/pause button gets accidentally pressed too easily. It could do with a lock button facility.I can recommend the leather case that is also made by this company as a supporting product to avoid nicks and scratches.

This DAP is beautifully built and the software interface extensive. Problem was manually selecting next track produced an ear-splitting crack which is likely to cause hearing damage at above average volume levels. Avoid until software fix is implemented. I sent mine back for a refund.

Only received today, so early days. First impressions are that this is a well made quality item.I like the fact that I can search by album or artist and it's easy to get from one end of the alphabet to the other.I'm using it mainly in my garden. I like that I can use the bluetooth feature to stream on line content from my phone through the M2X and that I can control the volume etc from my phone.The controls on the device are obvious and I found that it was easy to find and use the features without needing to refer to the manual - even changing the language from Chinese to English was intuitive.I have about 8000 tracks on the device. On 2 other devices I found that a lot of albums appeared to have no tracks. This one reads the info from the sd card without problem.With previous devices I found that I had to tweak the bass and treble on my amp to get a good sound. Now I have them back to a zero setting. It does have a built in graphic equaliser so you can customize your sound if you need to.On the minus side, all you get is the device, a USB type C cable and the user manual. No screen protector or case which is a shame at this price point. The battery also seems to run down quickly with bluetooth on.Overall, this is a cracking little player and I'm looking forward to giving it plenty of use.