We call that "personal taste" around here. I have friends who like M23, and I have friends who hate it too. I guess too bad you just don't understand the concept of subjectivity. Whatever floats your boat, man. I wish you good luck finding your ideal DAP.What you call not enough warm, neutral bright or might sound thin , i call bad tuned
FiiO M23, AK4191EQ+AK4499EX, THX AAA-78+, Dual Type-C Ports, Dual-Core Fast Charging, 1000mW+1000mW @32Ω
- Thread starter FiiO
- Start date
Dear friend,
Hi, our engineer have tried to test many time but failed to reproduce the same issue. If you are convenient, please provide more detailed problem description or video. If the issue happens again, you could also upload the log from technical support-online feedback. Thanks in advance!
Best regards
Not my video, i just found it on YouTube
The 7hz Legato able to sound thin with the m23 , that's a pretty serious achievement 
Hey everyone, I purchased M23 3 weeks ago in Tokyo after spending a couple of hours listening to the demo unit at Fujiya Avic, mostly as a QoL upgrade from BTR7 which I was using in USB-DAC mode for 95% of time and watching it discharge and recharge three times a day all while plugged into a laptop was making me sad for the little guy. So I just wanted to share some of my impressions, although it's going to get quite long I think. Disclaimer: I'm not good at describing sound and this is my first DAP, so I'll mostly try to focus on how it feels to use the device over how it sounds.
The good:
The bad:
The good:
- On the QoL side M23 mostly delivers. Battery bypass mostly works, although plugged to my laptop I'm still seeing the battery gradually lose charge, although at a very slow pace: I think it went from 100 to 69% in 3 weeks of 10+ hours of listening per day, about half of that listening to Amazon Music in Super High Gain mode.
- Speaking of Super High Gain, it was enough to drive ATH R70x (98 dB/mW, 470 ohms) comfortably loud at 58/120 DAP volume. My daily drivers, Fir Kr5, are just loud enough at 13-15/120 depending on the song. Actually, I'm not even sure I should be using Super High Gain with a sensitive IEM like Kr5, as there's an audible noise floor with them in that mode, that disappears in Low/Medium gain, and in Low I can still get them loud enough at 32/120 volume on the DAP.
- Outside of crazy workloads which would make any device chug (my 12k songs playlist on Amazon from when I was moving all my music from Spotify), M23 is suprisingly reponsive, and FiiO music is just a pleasure to use in general.
- Finally, the sound quality, I'm not sure how much of that is in my head as I definitely didn't do any blind A/B tests, but it certainly feels like a bit of an upgrade from BTR7 (which already was a pretty decent portable IEM source in my book). Instrument separation feels better, and even in some of the more extreme tracks with Kr5 (I mostly listen to death/black/post metal and metalcore/deathcore, with a bit of jpop and electronica thrown in for a good measure) I can hear e.g. twangs of individual guitar and bass strings being played, as opposed to just knowing "this is a guitar or bass being played in the wall of sound". Also to chime in on what was being discussed in this thread previously, I most certainly cannot hear any unnaturalness or thinness to the sound, and overall M23 seems to synergize quite well with the strengths of Kr5's sound for me: the visceral but still controlled bass response and the crisp treble. Listening to well produced recordings of live shows with eyes closed makes me feel I'm physically in the room, e.g. here's my favorite Rain City Sessions live by Misery Signals that sounds simply magical:
The bad:
- To be honest, nothing in my experience really comes to mind as strictly "bad" about M23. I'm yet to use it while traveling, so maybe it will somehow manage to disappoint me in that scenario, but so far as a stand-in for a desktop device it's mostly quite robust. However, that doesn't mean I have nothing to critique! We still have the next section for that.
- When doing the initial tests on my laptop with M23, I was pleasantly surprised to see there was no perceivable delay. I'm sad to say that's not quite the case after 3 weeks of use, however. I'm not quite sure what causes it, but sometimes the lag will actually be very noticeable when watching a video on youtube or trying to play a game, however it will be gone (or at least, reduced to the point of being virtually unnoticeable again) for a while if I switch the Preferred ASIO Buffer Size setting in the FiiO USB Control Panel application to a different value. It doesn't seem to matter what value I set it to, for example, switching from 4096 to 256 samples then back again still eliminates the delay. When the lag is present, it's impossible not to notice, something like 200 to 300ms. Overall this looks like a driver/firmware issue rather than a hardware problem seeing how this little trick is able to fix it for a duration of lets say a youtube watching session, but I certainly hope FiiO is able to resolve this in future updates. This is my biggest issue with M23 as it diminishes the experience of using M23 as a dedicated USB DAC.
- As mentioned above, battery bypass or D.Mode/Super High Gain are weird in that I'm still seeing the battery being slowly discharged (which supposedly means I don't have a powerful enough power source plugged in?), but can still select Super High Gain in the menu (which should only happen if sufficient power is being provided in the dedicated red usb port, right?). For what it's worth, I was able to access Super High Gain mode even without plugging any source into the dedicated "power-only" usb port at all: simply connecting the normal data port was enough for the mode to become selectable. So there's definitely some confused messaging going on, or potentially this is also something with the software. Not really a deal-breaker, though, and supposedly if I actually plug a power adapter into the dedicated power port it'll stop discharging? Meh it's slow enough that I don't really care that much.
- For some reason, when M23 is plugged into my PC and the PC is turned off, next time I boot it up M23's gain setting will be reset from Super High to Low Gain (I think probably because the laptop's port stops providing power when it's turned off). It'd be cool if the device could remember the last gain setting when used in USB-DAC mode separately.
- There's a nifty "rotate screen" option that essentially allows you to use M23 with usb ports facing upwards, and this really is nitpicking, but when using the DAP rotated like this it doesn't invert volume or song skip buttons, so suddenly you need to be pressing downwards on the slider-button to increase the volume etc.
- It's also cool to have a volume limit that I can customize in settings, however it seems to be shared between all the different gain modes. 40 volume max in Low Gain and Super High Gain really isn't the same thing at all, though, and it'd be nice if this setting could be customized separately for each gain level.
- For the time being, frankly I'm just leaning towards keeping the device with gain set to Low even when plugged in as the volume it provides with Kr5 is plenty, there's no noise and no risk of accidentally blowing out my eardrums/earphones if I somehow end up pressing the wrong volume button by mistake while it's in Super High but still using the (shared) max volume limit.
- Finally, Android 10, although this is to be rectified with the upcoming update to 12 in Summer, supposedly.
