With your smartphone’s ability to access hundreds of thousands of songs, why would you ever want to carry around a stand-alone music player these days? FiiO is betting music lovers will. And after testing out its new M11 Pro music player for a couple of weeks, I understand the allure.
The device looks like a thick Android phone with squared-off edges—very upscale and elegant. Compared to a phone, it feels surprisingly heavy—weighing nearly half a pound. But instead of thinking it weighs too much, I immediately thought that it was pleasantly substantial. The hi-res, 5.15-inch glass screen looks gorgeous. It’s a 10-point multi-touch screen with 1440 x 720 resolution and 18:9 HD touchscreen with 86 percent high screen ratio. It offers Dual-band WiFi—2.4GHz and 5GHz — and 9.5 hours of battery life. Plus, because it’s almost purely devoted to music, it supports 2.5mm balanced, 3.5mm single-ended and 4.4mm balanced audio outputs—as well as Bluetooth headphones. It’s equipped with 3GB of RAM plus 64GB of storage, but you can also insert a micro SD card with up to 2TB of space, for vastly more storage. What I love best: The all-black body sports a copper manual volume dial on the left side. It’s old school and looks fantastic.
Inside, the M11 Pro are two independent low phase noise crystal oscillators from Japan-based River Electec that help greatly reduce any distortion when doing any audio processing and ensures the purity of audio signals in general, for further improvement to the sound. It sounds heavenly—clearly better than on my Google Pixel 2XL phone. Believe me, I’m not an audiophile but I can definitely hear the difference. You can control various forms of sound via the DoP/D2P/Native output of DSD over USB.
Being most of us carry our phone with us 24/7, you can also install the FiiO Music app to your Android or Apple device to wirelessly control the M11 Pro, while also showing the M11 Pro’s current playback status. There you can control song selection, play/pause, volume adjustment and playlist management—via Bluetooth or WiFi. The M11 Pro is also Hi-Res Audio Wireless certified. The company says that with the fully balanced THX AAA amplifier, the sound quality is outstanding, and that the op-amps that are a part of the dual THX AAA-78 balanced amplifier architecture deliver extremely powerful output to easily drive most headphones. All I know is that my 70s and 80s music never sounded better.
The included FiiO Market—its own play store—comes with various music apps that you can download. I downloaded Spotify and TuneIn Radio, but was disappointed that I could not do the same for either Apple Music or Google Music. That said, I saw some hacks online that would allow me to do so. The operating system is built on Android 7.0, so it’s easy and familiar to traverse. It does support the Chrome browser, so you can also surf the web and watch videos. Short of offering phone and texting, it pretty much functions like an Android phone. But that’s not why you would want this device. It’s elegant and high-end, and lets music really sound the way it was intended—crystal clear with great range. It’s a sheer pleasure.
