FiiO M3K MP3/MP4 Player and Recorder, MP3 player, Silver

Nowadays, I find the times that I listen to music are when I'm in the car or on the bus, or cooking or tinkering. It's a pleasant background track to me getting on with 'stuff' and it's conveniently accessible anytime, anywhere because it's being delivered by my phone. All fine, but just occasionally I'll be tinkering in the sitting room and I'll put on a cd or even clear the clutter off the top of the record deck and suddenly I'm reminded what an amazing experience just listening to music for it's own sake can be. The surprise comes from realising just how much is missing from the compressed music we stream or play on our phones. We don't engage with it because we've lost the richness and depth that is in the original recording.So, I've looked at HiRes audio players for some time but the cost of entry always seemed too high. Now, however, there are lots of ChiFi players appearing but I remember the early days of mp3 players and how rubbish the firmware was in the no-brand copycats. I was swithering whether to take a punt when I came across the Fiio M3K. I've read good things about Fiio and they've been around for quite a few years so seeing the player at under £60 seemed a no-brainer.What you get is a pretty basic HiRes player but...1. It sounds great! The audio processing is superb and makes even low bitrate mp3s sound more open. It will play most HiRes formats, including DSD's (I bought one to check)2. Operationally, it's got a few quirks but it works well, is fairly intuitive and doesn't take much time to adapt to3. It's built really well and feels like a much more expensive, quality product4. Storage is on microSD cards so that's an extra cost. Allow another £20 or so for a 128GB card. That will hold a decent amount of CD quality files. (It will apparently work with up to a 2TB microSD if they ever make one)5. It can pump out a decent volume and battery life is genuinely amazing6. Your headphone/earphone choice makes a huge difference to the listening experience. The decent quality earbuds I enjoy using with my phone don't work well with this player. I think it's to do with them being low impedance. I've been trying my stage I.E.M.s and Studio headphones and they both sound pretty good. However, while they are very neutral and detailed they're also a bit clinical. After reading lot's of reviews I've opted for Fiio's own F5's and they've taken it to another level - much more 'musical' and engaging and also very comfortable to wear. I think they're a great match for the M3K.Music is so embedded in our psyche it's worth getting the best you can from it. With Mp3's we traded quality for convenience and lost that visceral connection. This player lets you re-engage with your music and experience the thrill and emotional roller coaster that made you buy it in the first place.

Ok, considering the price it's really hard to knock this player in terms of what you're actually getting for your money. The build quality, sound quality and battery life are absolutely excellent - so I guess that's your main priorities covered for a High-Res music player...... but, for full disclosure, I must be honest in saying it is pretty annoying to use for the following reasons. 1) The controls are not intuitive at all, and really take some getting used to. The touch screen/scroll feature is far too sensitive and not adjustable 2) The unit itself is really small - which I guess is a plus point for some people, but the downside is that the screen and text is very small and hard to read. 3) The file structure is ultra basic, doesn't support sub-folders, and you can't create playlists within the player itself ...so, for example if you wanted to have the same song in 4 different playlists, you'd have to create a folder for each playlist on your pc, with an individual copy of the song in each one and transfer all 4 folders to the M3 player.....which is a bit of a pain and a massive waste of both memory on your players SD card, and the hard drive space on your pc, which is pretty relevant when you're dealing with the large file sizes of High-Res. As I say, the sound quality and battery life is amazing, so it's worth buying as an entry level player....but I must be honest in saying the flawed functionality drives me nuts, too the point of submission and having to upgrade to a much more expensive player. That said though - the weight of the good points of this unit certainly DO give me confidence to stick with the Fiio brand as an upgrade.

Very well made music player, feels solidly built from high quality materials. A rubber case is included which makes the player easy to hold & prevents scratches. There is no internal memory, so a micro sd card is required. It is very easy to add music from a computer onto the player via the sd card. The interface takes a little while to get used to, but is then easy to navigate. Sound is very good, especially when using high resolution flac files, but also very good using normal mp3 files. Volume goes high if wanted. Scrolling through a lot of songs takes a little while, but is no problem. Updating the song list is very easy & quick once new songs have been added. The player requires a firmware update even when new, I was a bit wary of downloading files from the manufacturers website, but there was no problem doing this, and everything was safe & worked well. The player can be used as a dac to play high res music from a computer, again, for windows computers, a download is required. Again this is safe & easy to do via the makers website. To summarise, this is a high quality, well made music player/ dac at a very good price, the sound quality of music is excellent, and it is easy to use after a bit of practice. Highly recommended !