Shanling M3X Portable Lossless Digital Audio Player & USB DAC

Product Information

I recently was using an iFi xDSD Gryphon as an external DAC/amp, and I wanted to use the M3X as a transport. Introducing Shanling M3X​M3X is our newest Android Hi-Res portable player, built on the same platform as our previous three Android models. This means that M3X is not exactly ideal if your favorite music style is Technical Death Metal and bands like Brain Drill or Dethklok, or hard trancecore, but it is great for pretty much everything else. There will only be a total of 1500 units of these made, with only 500 units available for the international market. Shanling or Shenzhen Digital Shanling Techno is a huge company from Shenzhen, China, focused on delivering music, as life is short, and you need to play more.

I find these numbers pretty good and most people will be using a device like this for IEMs or easy to run headphones. The display has more than enough resolution to be crisp and clean, and it has a very good color support too. It has all the extra features expected like EQ, Folder Skip, Stop When Headphones Are Disconnected, Resume Play on Start. The buttons are tactile and easily decipherable by touch allowing easy adjustments when not in direct sight.

This is very important because Android has put audiophiles in some trouble at its early stages where it did some kind of resampling that applied to all apps, so you could not benefit from the DACs fully. Wifi support is excellent, with excellent signal strength and up to 5 MB of download speed with two walls between the router and M3x. Every other app has a bad tendency to hitch and stop playing during tracks, or just fail to load the next track in an album or playlist.

Though I feel like it will only appeal to the original M3X owners or those looking for the absolute smallest DAP that is running Android. The sound in general is however in its totality quite neutral with (as already mentioned) a tendency to warm always pleasant and never over the top.The volume control is granular enough for any sensitive IEMs, even if you leave M3X on high gain and dual dac mode at all times. PRaT, Texturization, Detail, Resolution, Dynamics, Impact, and overall tonality are all revealed by those songs. It has UPnP and SyncLink options built into it, you can make playlists, delete tracks at your will and other basic functions include a basic graphic EQ if EQing is the need of the hour.

does not give the idea of being an entry level DAP, especially from a qualitative and multimedia point of view.

With support of UPnP you can connect to your media servers without carrying around your whole music library with you. is slightly bereft of features and renders itself obsolete on some apps, meaning support is a concern.

On the right of the device is the all-familiar volume scroll wheel which is purposefully positioned at the natural resting point of the thumb allowing for easy ergonomic tampering of volume levels. You still have access to setting, you can access wireless connections but you can’t access any other app. It did indeed help calm the violence down a bit in the upper treble and while it was still a little too bright up top for me, I was at least able to listen to it longer than normal. This lies in stark contrast with the minimalist single port on the original Shanling M8 which can be niftily switched between 2.Grip" in the norm even if the dimensions of the dap make it easy to manage and very little slippery.