A mostly admirable music player, but one that refuses to let its hair down
Portable music player | £489 | whf.cm/FiiOM11S
FiiO’s M11S has all the mod cons of a music player in 2023 – file support that extends to 32-bit/384kHz, DSD256 and MQA; access to music-streaming services (plus every other app on Android); and even a choice of 3.5mm, balanced 2.5mm and balanced 4.4mm headphone outputs. But it also goes the extra mile to become a bigger part of your music-listening life, thanks to its extracurricular duty as a USB DAC for your laptop, not to mention its ability to stream music to wireless headphones and speakers via Bluetooth (LDAC, aptX HD, LHDC) or AirPlay.
The M11S is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 660 chip (the same used in FiiO’s flagship M17), so it’s no surprise that every task we ask of the player is performed with haste and without issue.
What you use and how you use it will determine how much action the FiiO can deliver from a single charge, though the claimed figure is 14 hours for single-ended use. During our testing, we found it ran for around 11 hours playing 16-bit to 24-bit files at a middling volume – not bad, though bettered by Astell & Kern’s SR25 MkII entry level player. As long as you don’t want a player to blast music loudly for the length of a transatlantic flight, the M11S’s battery life should be satisfactory for most use cases, whether that’s at the heart of your home desktop or hi-fi system or accompanying you on your commute.
There is another cost you need to factor into the £489 price, however – that of a microSD card, as the M11S has a mere 32GB built in storage. The player’s hefty 125 x 74 x 19mm dimensions – just shorter than a Samsung Galaxy phone but wider and almost three times the depth – makes it more coat-pocket than jeans-pocket-sized, though more desktop-suitable than both.
FiiO has been in the game long enough to know how to produce an intuitive music player both from hardware and software perspectives. The FiiO Music app gives a positive first impression – open it up and it prompts you to scan local files on the device and any networked files you may have on a NAS device. And it builds on that during our testing with a logically laid out and pleasantly attractive interface that most people will get to grips with within minutes.
Clarity and precision
Android device users will be comfortable with the familiar interface, though we would encourage owners to deep-dive into the menus to explore player-specific settings. We find, for example, that switching on all ‘All To DSD’ (conversion) and Pure Music
