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 to 3. It's built really well and feels like a much more expensive, quality product 4. 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 amazing 6. 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.

I had to return a Sony NW A45 which was just hopeless user wise and sound wise. I saw this FiiO M3K on a You Tube channel as one of the top recommended hi resplayers for 2019. It over £300 cheaper than any of the other recommended units in that online piece. A bit more research made me aware of a few limitations that I thought I could live with and I took the plunge. Oh boy am I glad I did! CONS: No Bluetooth Not touchscreen but has a sort of hybrid touchscreen interface in the lower 2 thirds of the front panel takes a little getting used to at first. Small size means quite a small display screen PROS Top notch sound quality. Drives all of my headphones and earphones plenty loud enough with needing additional portable amp. Small and lightweight ones with a silicone protective sleeve Excellent solid output jack. I just took out the 128Gb micro so card that contained much of my music ripped from CD from my Chuwi hi10 pro windows 10 tablet, and popped it into the M3K card slot, fired up the little machine and it instantly recognised and replicated the library structure that I had created. Every album cover was also shown. No issues on any of the 229 albums on that card. No issues with scrambling of tracks or missing an albums first track that I encountered with the Sony NW A45. I had not created playlists and rarely use them except on my phone via Spotify so I don’t know how they would fare transferring. My intention is to continue to rip CDs to my tablet in Windows 10 creating more libraries on other cards and then use them in the M3K when I wish. I use wired headphones and did not intend to stream to other devices so the stands alone nature of the M3K suits me fine but it won’t be right for everyone... think carefully about whether you can live with the limited feature set of the device. UPDATE 20 October 2019 okay I’ve had this for 9 months. I was finding that if I charged the player and left it for a week or so without using it that there was no power. I think there is a issue where it did not completely turn off even though the screen gives a goodbye message. However the huge issue is that the whole screen plate has popped out of the metal case. The screen intermittently still works but this is pretty poor. Such a shame as the sound is amazing. I will contact Amazon for advice and update again in due course. Update to Update: Excellent service from Alex at Amazon tech support who put me in touch with the fab supplier EA Audio in Fleet. Elliot from EA Audio not only processed the exchange for a brand new unit but also returned my micro SD card that I left in the broken unit. I was only around 10 days without my M3K. Thanks to Amazon tech support and EA Audio for top customer service.

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 !

The sound quality is very good. You can use a 400 GB micro SD card and put a lot of music on it. The only thing I didn't like was the way it handles the music library, it doesn't show albums sorted by composer and the list by genre doesn't group tracks into albums, it just shows all tracks in alphabetical order. When I got it I was very pleased with it. But then it stopped working. The seller and Amazon both said they couldn't replace it, I would have to contact FiiO. So I tried to contact FiiO but they never replied. Amazon agreed to give me a refund since I could not get support for the device so I sent it to Amazon and got my money back. If it had been repaired or replaced I would have given it a four or five star rating but the lack of support means I cannot recommend it.

The device itself is great quality in feeling and appearance, sounds great, long battery so cant complain there. However the first one I purchased had an issue with the micro sd card slot as others have said, the card refused to come out at first and when it did the card never worked again, unable to format. Still determined to give this player a fair shot I got got another one and whilst the sd card slot is still somewhat inconsistent I haven't had the same problem however I havnt removed it for fear of it breaking so precautions advised.

I am using it with a pair of MEZE 99 Classics to play my FLAC music collection and I must say I am impressed by the sound quality of FiiO M3K. Punchy, clear sound with a lot of detail and good instrument separation. The build quality is also very good, although I had some issues initially when trying to remove the SD card from the slot and it did not eject properly, thus I needed to extract it with a tweezer. But after a couple of tries, the eject mechanism got a bit loose and now it's working properly. The display resolution is not the best, but it's good enough for a portable player, and there is no bluetooth connectivity available. My unit came with firmware version 1.2.2 and I upgraded it with no issues to the newest one. In conclusion, I highly recommend this player to everyone looking for great sound quality at a decent price!

Quite some time ago i was tempted to buy one of these, as the audio quality on mobile phones are good, but certainly not great (using a Samsung a71 at present), my Honor 10 shares the same DAC as this, though i sold that as i didn't need 2 phones. Having a dedicated Hi Res player is definitely better than using a phone. The only phones comparable with this audio quality wise are from LG with their excellent quad DAC's. Sound quality is clean and detailed with a relatively wide soundstage, vocals are good, though bass is good, but won't thrill a 'BASSHEAD' though it IS pleasingly accurate. My Honor 10 (using the awesome 'PowerAmp' app) sounding somewhat punchier with better sub bass, though with a slightly narrower soundstage. What initially put me off was NO CUSTOM EQUALISER settings.....but now its been updated with a user customizable setting...YES. It's built VERY well and is VERY solid. I have around 8200 tracks on a 128gb card and all is working well. For it's price it's an amazingly decent little player, though the somewhat cumbersome UI does let it down a little, once you get used to it (just a few hours use needed) it's ok to live with. Update: If you have a large library of music, you'll find this is VERY laggy while 'trying' to scroll through lists, to the point where it occasionally freezes for around 5 seconds. I have other Hi Res players that are cheaper that run very smooth with no issues at all. My Benjie S5 (fantastic device), which cost £15 is SIGNIFICANTLY faster, though is limited in functions compated to this. It's still a fantastic player, but having no 'quick search' function in long lists and it's underpowered processor do let it down a bit. But.... Do i still recommend it? . . . . . . .HELL YEAH