FiiO Unveils Flagship M15 Player

If you’re into portable audio, then there’s no doubt that you’ll know exactly who FiiO is. Many of us who really delved into this world of portable audio within the last 5 years or so have owned at least one FiiO device along the way. Taking a look back over the relatively short lifespan of FiiO, they’ve certainly come a hell of a long way, and their broad product portfolio is nothing short of being immensely impressive. However, there is always progress to be made, new mountains to climb, and new technology to take advantage of. Whilst FiiO have only really produced about 3 ‘flagship’ products (original X5, X7, and X7 Mark II), the X7 Mark II was announced roughly 30 months ago. Since then we’ve seen numerous refreshes of older models as well as the introduction of a few new models (of which the M11 could easily have been a flagship device), but it’s no obvious that FiiO have been hard at work behind the curtains to bring us something pretty spectacular. FiiO’s 2019 Winter Launch Event saw the unveiling of a new LC-BT2 Bluetooth neckband cable, the FH1s hybrid-design IEM, and an all-new flagship player, the M15.

Meet The M15

2019 has been an extremely busy year for FiiO’s music player department. Back in March they announced the M11 (along with the M5), and then in August we got the details about the M11 Pro. Right from the start there was confirmation that the M11 would not be FiiO’s flagship device, and instead that the ‘true flagship’ will be announced towards the end of the year. Well, that time has come and we’ve finally been able to see what FiiO has cooked up in the form of the M15.
To some extent, the M15 shares not only various design similarities with some of FiiO’s other players, but also those made by Sony. Perhaps the most obvious design-element is the large rotary dial to be seen along the top left of the device. It looks somewhat similar to the volume-dial of the K3 DAC/AMP, and perhaps hints even slightly to the Paw Gold by Lotoo. Elsewhere along the top edge sits a total of 3 output ports – a 3.5mm single-ended output, as well as both 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced ports.
The ‘indented-design’ on left and right sides of the M15 also has a slight resemblance to the design of Sony’s WM1A and WM1Z, and this similarity is carried over to the design of the round playback-control buttons too. The display looks very familiar, and that’s because it seems to be the same 5.15-inch panel as is used on the M11 and M11 Pro. With a resolution of 1440×720, this gives the M15 a nice crisp pixel density of 312 PPI. It’s certainly not as sharp as the 440 PPI display found on iBasso’s DX160, but it’s still very respectable nonetheless.

Under the hood is where we find some major upgrades, as well as yet more similarities between the M15 and FiiO’s other devices. First up is the implementation of the dual AK4499EQ DAC chips, which are AKM’s flagship chips. With this comes numerous improvements on the spec-sheet in terms of SNR and THD figures, as well as the ability to decode up to 768hKz/32-bit formats.Some improvements have also been made in the Bluetooth department whereby the transmitter version is still on 4.2, but the receiver has been upgraded to Bluetooth 5.0. What this means is that, unlike the M11 and M11 Pro, the M15 is not limited to receiving just SBC or LDAC signals, but instead can also support AptX, AptX HD, AptX LL, and AAC.

Unfortunately, the brains running the whole operation has remained unchanged, meaning that FiiO have opted to still use the Exynos 7872 CPU as is the case for the M11-series. FiiO were criticised for using this chipset in the M11-series because of the fact that it limited the device to a legacy version of Android. So, now in the case of the M15, it’ll be interesting to see if the device will yet again be stuck on an older version, or if FiiO have perhaps managed to work out a way to upgrade it to a more recent (or even the most recent) version of Android. Curiously, FiiO made very little mention in their presentation about the Android software the M15 would be running, which makes it seem highly likely that the device might still be hit with the same limitation as previous devices, and hence they didn’t want to bring that under the spotlight.
Another similarity is in the amount of RAM used as the M15 also gets a total of 3GB of RAM.

However, the biggest shock about the M15 is the price. For the most part, FiiO have always been focused on producing quality devices at very reasonable prices. When the M11 Pro was released, there was a decent amount of chatter about the roughly $200 premium over the regular M11. The M15, on the other hand, makes the $650 price-tag of the M11 Pro almost seem like pocket-change. In fact, the M15 is set to cost double what the M11 Pro does, and is the first player from FiiO to cross well over the $1000 mark.