FiiO M17 Portable Desktop-Class Music Player

I have other high end audio devices that are heavy and bulky. While M17 is heavy, it is not bulky. I use cargo pants and have no trouble sliding it into a pocket. I have a Sony that needs to phone to get music, and it is bulky, even if it half the size of the M17.No other portable or transportable will beat this sound, to the best of my knowledge. Of course I have not tried them all but have quite a few that go over a grand and this beats them hands down. I have a number of desktop audio setups, with separate DAC and Amp driving a headphone. They are outstanding but this beats them.You can use headphones on many DAP's today, but it will not sound right They just do not have the power. If you think they are the same, you need to do some A/B testing. I have a really nice ibasso 240 and cannot use them with any headphone that is a power hog. The M17 is the only exception to this rule. I really want to use my HD800s with this but I need a 700 dollar cable. As my best desktop audio system is using the HD800s, there is no really need to buy that cable.I'm going to test it with my HD600 soon. This one the best mid costly cans, but a known power hog. I'm positive it will only sound right if I get the special cable but just being to do it is amazing.The M17 even has a setting for using hard to drive headphones. It requires using the power supply. So it turns into a desktop player at that point. It comes with a stand that has fans, so you can keep it cool when using it is desktop mode.It does get warm but it has not been hot to me. Perhaps I'm more careful to get the DAP bit of wind than most people do. Put someplace with no air flow, and it can get very, very hot.The sound is just the best. I'm use to quality music. I'm not an expert but have changed music when the quality of the player is bad or the DAP cannot lift the load.I use Tidal and Amazon music, at the highest setting. I had no idea that the Tidal compression could sound that good. All my systems have older Tidal versions and devices. I'm not sure what x 20 does but it sounds outstanding.I now have stopped using the rips of my DC collection and going with the Tidal version instead. I have not done any A/B testing between Amazon and Tidal yet. I had some trouble with Tidal, since fixed, so I got Amazon music. It is cheap and a good backup when I'm using my phone or a non-Tidal device.I had no trouble connecting with Bluetooth. I have had devices that sometimes take some work to get to it to connect. This has connected quickly on every wireless devise I have tried. Admittedly not a lot of testing.I could just be me an my 72 years but I'm not a fan of the interface. I'm often searching for a function and when I finally got it, could not tell you what I did different to get a success after the failure. I'll have to break down and study the manual.The case that came with it is sub par. If I grab it while it is upside down, the M17 tries to slip out. The flap will slide open letting the DAP start to slide out of the case. Not a big problem and yours might be better. I expect and after market case that is better to hit the market if this is the success I believe it will be.Funny, I use a music player when playing on the music on the computer. The developer of the music program was not a Tidal fan. He said it would fail so it was not worth his time to create a Tidal version. Only that was five or six years ago. I'll have to give him a ribbing about that if I ever talk to him.If you are not afraid of carrying a 5lb DAP, or one that costly, I highly recommend this. You could spend more and get less on a desktop system. Only without speakers, of course. I like to listen to my headphones rather than speakers most times.The biggest danger is that with Biden's recession combined with a 2K price, will harm the sales.Speakers can sound the best but it takes time and work to get an even good setup sounding right. If married, you might find it impossible. Some people build a room, just for music. So headphones are the way to go, especially if you live in an apartment.You can get two top of the line headphones headphones for cost of one set of top of the line speakers. set of speakers and put in into the wrong room, and get sub par music. At the top of line, say the 10k range, speakers can cost thee price of two top of the line headphones.Of course, most high end speakers are more hype and sucker bait than quality. I cannot count the number of ways I have seen people put one strange set of Bose speakers in. Far more hype than anything else.There is an old saying. Welcome to Audiophile, sorry about your wallet.

Big and heavy, not quite portable but the sound and options for music makes it a favorite dsp player. Love it.You need to rip your cd's in high resolution music: WAV, FlAC, etc to geg the koat out of this piece of art. A good quality headset is a must as well.

More than enough power for IEMs, of course, and also plenty of juice with headroom left for an Arya Stealth planar magnetic headphone — 32 ohms, 94 dB — if used in the highest gain mode. The sound signature is just … clear. You’ll split an eardrum before you hear distortion.Eight or more hours of battery life while actually streaming and driving headphones with it? No way, no how. Maybe four hours in that use case, and that’s pushing it. Using it in DC-only mode, which lets the user bypass the battery, dodges that issue, but don’t expect expect to sit outside from noon until evening while blissing out to tunes on your M17. But this battery assessment is from the previous firmware …Since the M17 update to 1.0.4 at the end of June, the battery on this user’s M17 has begun behaving strangely — strangely hot. Using it in DC-only mode is supposed to bypass the battery. Even when the device would get warm — which it will under normal use — the battery would be unaffected. Since the firmware update the battery has begun to overheat in any mode, leading to notifications about the battery overheating. The DAP actually gets much hotter now than it used to. This reviewer’s entreaties to FiiO about resolving the issue have been met with total silence by the company. At least one M17 user on Head-fi has written about encountering the same problem as of July 15, eight days prior to this writing.Pending the resolution of this issue, this user CANNOT RECOMMEND this DAP.

I don't know where all the rave reviews about sound quality come from, because the only one I agree with is the one that said the soundstage isn't very wide.There is a lack of air and detail up top, the upper mids are strident and shouty. The bass lacks texture and definition. It's just brute force but not very musical.I prefer the sound of my $600 Cayin N3 Pro, even with the Cayin in solid state mode.I used HE1000SE, Arya Organic, and HE560 in my listening tests, with FLAC files ripped straight from CD.I also tried HD660s and found it to be an awful pairing.All of the above tests were in balanced mode. I also tried AKG K712 in single ended mode, and was a better pairing, but that isn't saying too much.DC enhanced mode gave more power and more impact but the tonality was essentially the same.Adjusting the digital filter didn't help too much, but I found that the slow roll-off minimum phase sounded best on most material.I also experimented with the All to DSD function. This tamed the shouty upper mids a bit, but also dampened and deadened the overall sound a bit. I'd also get occasional loud pops and digital noise in All to DSD mode at the beginning of tracks.I also found the Fiio music app to be very laggy and choppy when scrolling through songs. I have a 1TB SD card with over 40000 songs on it, and it is a Sandisk, not a cheap generic card. And my phones don't have this problem with the card, so it's gotta be an issue with the Fiio.I installed USB Audio Player Pro on it (an excellent app I have been using for many years on many devices) and didn't have the lag issues. However, UAPP would often freeze and lock up, requiring a force quit from settings-> apps. I've never had this issue with UAPP on any other device, including galaxy S8, Galaxy Note Ultra, Galaxy S24 Ultra, Motorola Razr 2020, and Sony Xperia 1 V.Lastly, I couldn't get the fiio remote control app to work.As others have said, this thing is a huge, heavy brick. Bigger than the pictures seem to show. And as others have said, it gets very hot very quick. Which worries me about longevity, as heat is the number one killer of electronic devices.All this would've been fine if the sound quality lived up to expectations. But, my $400 Hifiman EF400 sounds substantially better. I know I'm comparing desktop to portable here, but the EF400 is at an entry level price point, and the M17 costs several times more. I expected the M17 to perform at least as well as the EF400, but I didn't expect it to perform as well as my main desktop DAC/AMP stacks.The point is, I didn't have unrealistic expectations, but this device really disappoints me sonically.3 stars because of massive power and tons of connectivity.