Other than that, though, and the fact that the touchscreen is predictably tricky to operate, there are no further concessions necessary. Any music you want it to play will have to be stored on a microSD card - the M0 can support anything up to 512GB. Of course, sacrifices have to be made to bring in a hi-res music player for this kind of money, and sure enough the Shanling has no built-in memory. Despite being able to handle hi-res digital audio files, despite having a bright full-colour touch-screen and a battery that’s good for 15 hours of playback from a single charge, the M0 weighs next-to nothing and is practically the same size as an Apple Watch with a nice aluminium and glass construction. There’s ‘portable’, and then there’s the Shanling M0 (£99).

Price: £599 | Check price on Amazon | FiiO | Audio Affair

Pros: Thrillingly direct expansive, informative sound built to last Cons: Relatively chunky dimensions In short, then, £599 is only a lot of money if you didn’t spend it on one of these. There’s an almost instinctive correctness to the way the FiiO sounds than makes most of its rivals sound mechanical and laboured by comparison. It doesn’t sacrifice momentum in order to bring all the subtleties of a recording to life, and it doesn’t overplay any area of the frequency range. In sonic terms it just doesn’t put a foot wrong: its sound is hefty but deft, astonishingly detailed, completely uncluttered and absolutely wide open. But everything’s relative, of course - and if you consider the FiiO’s painstaking specification, premium materials, bank-vault construction and beautifully realised interface, you might consider the asking price could be worse.Īnd then when you hear the M11 Pro in action, you realise it’s among the most effective and enjoyable ways of becoming £599 poorer imaginable. At this price the M11 Pro couldn’t be described as a bargain.

Amazon music player portable