New FiiO portable music player offers desktop-grade hi-res audio on the go

Having recently impressed us with their mid-range FiiO M11S portable digital audio player, Chinese audio firm FiiO is back with a decidedly high-end offering for its next on-the-go device.

The new M15S portable player comes packed with two desktop-grade ES9038PRO digital-to-analog converters, with individual DAC chips dedicated to the left and right stereo channels.

Each chip makes use of four D/A converters for what FiiO claim to be extremely high-quality decoding, with the device able to support playback of audio files up to 384kHz/DSD256. 

The new M15S also supports MQA, allowing listeners to directly stream TIDAL Masters as well as MQA files stored locally, while further Hi-Res audio options come in the form of aptX HD Bluetooth, alongside LDAC and LHDC wireless codecs. 

There’s onboard 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi allowing for support of Apple AirPlay and DLNA streaming, as well as compatibility with the increasingly popular multi-room music software platform Roon.

Weighing 345g, the device runs on Android 10, which allows for lossless access to Tidal, Qobuz and Apple Music, and it’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 processor – the same CPU which features on FiiO’s flagship M17 hi-res audio player.

Along with a regular 3.5mm headphone jack and both 2.5mm and 4.4mm balanced headphone outputs, there’s a 5.5-inch multi-touch HD display with 64GB of onboard storage that can be expanded up to 2TB of extra storage via the microSD card slot.

The FiiO M15S is available now to order for $999/£979 from the FiiO website, and set to ship later this month.

We can’t wait to put it through its paces and see how it matches up to best MP3 players currently out there. Watch this space…