Introduction

Shanling was established in 1988, making it one of the most experienced audio brands globally. It has a highly respected product history, and much in the way of developed and patented technologies along the way. Shanling is one of the first names many think when it comes to portable audio, either with its digital audio players (DAPs) or IEMs, and we've covered one each of Shanling's wired and wireless IEMs before. Today we take our first look at Shanling's audio player range, and it emphasizes the portable audio aspect in more ways than one.


Shanling's portable audio player lineup covers the iPod Shuffle-sized M0 all the way to flagship DAPs such as the M9 which impressed me a lot at the Shenzhen International Audio Show. In fact, it was at that very show that Shanling debuted its latest audio player—the M8T which offers a hybrid solid-state transistor or tube-based amplification pathway. While I will aim to cover it in more detail via a full review if Shanling reciprocates my interest, they did offer me a recently released and more budget-friendly DAP at the show itself. I ended up bringing back the Shanling M1 Plus with me, and have been using it for a few weeks now. It comes in black or silver colors, is highly portable, comes with an optional case accessory, has an integrated color touchscreen display, and actually shies away from Android to maintain a more pure music player experience. Let's take a closer look at the M1 Plus in this quick look article which begins with a look the product specifications below. Thanks to Shanling for providing a sample to TechPowerUp!

Packaging and Accessories

The Shanling M1 Plus ships in a reasonably sized box, fairly close in size to a typical IEM product box to give you more context. There's an external sleeve in white with the brand logo and product name on the front, and we also see a cutout at the top revealing not only the inner box but also the brand's marketing slogan. This continues on the back with some product specifications listed in multiple languages, contact information for the company, and certification stickers too with more on the sides—the customary Hi-Res Audio and Hi-Res Audio Wireless badges make a showing as expected. The inner box is gray and fairly simple with just the aforementioned slogan and another logo on it. Lift the lid to reveal the audio player right away, placed inside a thick foam sheet with a machined cutout to snugly hold it, and another foam section on the underside of the lid for added protection. I appreciated the pull tag and finger cutouts, making it easy to remove the player and access the bottom layer. Shanling provides a decent set of accessories with the M1 Plus, and these are neatly packed in two separate sections as seen above. We get a multi-language quick start guide (online version here) going over the setup and use of the player, an introduction to the brand and its products, a spare screen protector for the display, and a short USB Type-C to Type-A cable to help charge the internal battery and use for data transmission from, say, your PC desktop/laptop to transfer music files, or to use the M1 Plus as a USB DAC/amplifier.


Nearly every modern DAP comes with a case accessory, be it included in the box or available as an optional extra. This helps with better grip in holding the player in your hands in addition to protecting the DAP's chassis and providing a more secure surface to lay down on your desk, for example. It's optional because some still prefer how the DAPs look without a case, and this is a similar argument to using your phone with or without a case. Regardless, Shanling provides a case made specifically for the M1 Plus, down to the cutouts to fit the buttons and knob on the DAP as we will soon see, and it ships in a separate cardboard box if you end up ordering one. There's hilariously a lot of foam to protect this case too, which is supposedly green in color but feels more like teal to me. Pull out the foam insert and now you have a case that's ready to be used with the M1 Plus. There's a faux leather exterior with frankly better stitching quality than I expected, and a soft Alcántara-like inner surface to prevent any scratches to the DAP. Oh, and it costs all of $5 when purchased with the M1 Plus, so I feel you might as well get it just in case.

Closer Look and User Experience

At 86 x 61 x 17 mm and weighing under 120 g, the Shanling M1 Plus is one of the most portable audio players in the market today. Shanling itself makes even smaller sets, including the M0 Pro that I feel deserves more attention, but this is a good balance of being pocketable, easy to hold in the hands, and still have a large enough display to use properly. I have the silver version here, with the other color being all-black for a stealthier look. We see branding on the bottom bezel, with the unit having a 3.2" 320x480 pixel LCD touchscreen panel. The chassis looks to be CNC-machined aluminium alloy, and certainly feels anything but cheap. More branding is seen on the back panel which also hosts the Hi-Res Audio stickers, and this is also where we find the M1 Plus supports up to 10 W of charging—actually quick for a device in this class/price range, although Shanling claims up to 15 W of accelerated charging is possible. The sides have protruding edges that meet towards the back, and this helps provide room for your fingers to naturally grasp it in case you go without a case.

On the right side is a cutout which accommodates a knurled volume control wheel that doubles up as a power/lock button too. The opposite side has three buttons, already raised at an angle to visually indicate which side to push down, for media playback controls. Thankfully there is no play with any of these buttons or the wheel, with tighter manufacturing tolerances making for a stable experience. At the top we see a 3.5 mm single-ended headphone output, which is also a line output or coaxial SP/DIF output, alongside a 4.4 mm balanced headphone output. The bottom side contains a microSD card slot—the M1 Plus supports cards of capacity up to 2 TB—and USB Type-C input that allows the M1 Plus to be used as a USB DAC/amp as well as for data transfer of files from your PC to the microSD card. There is no local storage available, with the tiny amount of embedded onboard flash memory taken up by Shanling's MTouch OS running on its Ingenic X2000 system platform driving the player in the absence of an Android operating system more expensive DAPs tend to use.


The optional case fits like a glove, although removing it is not easy given the wheel and buttons all have a tiny slope downwards. That said, I imagine no one will have to take this case off anyway given it looks nice and also prevents the sharper corners on the metal chassis from having a mishap. The cutouts allow room to access all the I/O features, and don't block the indicator lights around the volume wheel either as seen above.


Press down and hold the volume wheel for ~2 seconds to turn on the M1 Plus, and you will notice the indicator light turning on immediately, with the display going from the loading animation to being ready to use in under 10 seconds. The indicator light color can be changed in the menu, and the swift turnaround time for the DAP is a result of the stripped-down platform that prioritizes local playback. This means there is no way to add apps or widgets if you are used to an Android-based player, thus the M1 Plus is not for everyone. At the same time, for someone like me who prefers using local playback anyway and with a rich collection of FLACs/MP3s, this is a non-issue. Helping alleviate the lack of streaming is Tidal, which comes pre-installed, but here too you should know this version does not allow offline downloads, meaning it will always stream and requires an internet connection. I don't use Tidal, so my poor Qobuz account for when I like to just discover new music and artists is left relegated to the side. The Shanling player app works really well though, offering excellent file distribution and allowing easy navigation/sorting to find what you are looking for. It's extremely smooth too, and I also appreciated it picking up all the details from the files—lyrics, album covers, and so on. There's a pull-down menu with shortcuts, similar to an Android device, and we can even get double tap to wake the screen when you enable it in the settings. The device as a whole is extremely smooth to use, no doubt a result of the highly optimized and streamlined MTouch OS and the smaller screen allowing the screen resolution to not be a bottleneck in use while also not being demanding on system resources. Note that there is a limit of 20,000 tracks at a time, but this seems to be more the norm with DAPs than an exception. I saw some people mention there may be occasional lag if you have a lot of album artwork, although I did not experience this in my testing.


Here we can see the default loading screen, which prompts you to choose the language when you first start the device. It then goes over how to use the touchscreen to pull up various elements, which helps lower any entry barriers. The GIF above then shows the three screens filled with the pre-installed apps/shortcuts, which we see are primarily dedicated to making local playback easier. The system settings menu allows you to, among other things, change the operating language, enable a wireless network with Wi-Fi networks over 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz supported here, network settings for DLNA/Airplay and Bluetooth, control the display brightness and idle timeout, set the date and time of the device, allow for a car mode which turns on the M1 Plus when it gets charged and turns it off a minute after being disconnected, the aforementioned double tap to wake, locking the buttons to prevent accidental hits, rotating the screen if you prefer to have the volume wheel on the left or headphone outputs on the bottom, and changing between some pre-installed system themes. Firmware updates happen over the internet or if you have a firmware file on the microSD card, although there was not one available at the time of testing—not a surprise given this is a fairly new product that is already polished/bug-free. But be aware that you can't have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connected simultaneously, owing to a hardware limitation.


The playback settings are accessible via the pull-down menu too, and these are going to be more in use as you get familiar with the player as well as your own music preferences. Some of the important options get their own shortcuts as we saw before, including gain (low or high), USB playback setting, and output setting. The rest are in the larger selection, and here you get your choice of digital filters (native from the DAC), system-wide 10-band EQ from -6 to +6 dB going from 32 Hz to 16 kHz and with various preset EQ filters, play mode, changing the max volume for ear safety, a memory setting for default volume, DSD playback options, and whether you wish to allow volume control when using the M1 Plus as a USB source. Memory playback settings are extremely useful given the nature of the M1 Plus prioritizing local playback, and you can also enable some channel balance if the recordings and/or the headphones/IEMs themselves have mismatch—I did not notice any channel imbalance from this source even at lower volumes. In an ideal world, we'd have full PEQ on offer here, but I get that Shanling can only do so much on this device. I do wish the EQ sliders were more responsive though—use deliberate steps rather than forcing a smoother movement to your desired value.


The Shanling M1 Plus uses an ESS SABRE ES9069Q 2-channel DAC, hence those digital filters, with MQA decoding that feels untimely in late 2024, even if now the Tidal support makes more sense given this was no doubt planned out before MQA was phased out of Tidal. An in-house FPGA processor is combined with independent crystal oscillators (audio clock) and good quality componentry throughout, including the widely regarded and now discontinued ELNA Silmic II capacitors. Amplification comes via two SG Micro SG8282 op-amps providing up to 47/187 mW at 32 Ω off the 3.5/4.4 mm outputs in low gain mode, respectively, going up to 195/661 mW with high gain off the same outputs. As such, there's actually a lot of power here to even drive some more demanding headphones—think more on the higher impedance than lower sensitivity side though. I expect most people will use the M1 Plus with IEMs, making for a highly portable personal audio solution. Here I would recommend starting with the 3.5 mm output first given the lower output impedance; I noticed some slight background hiss with more sensitive IEMs connected to the balanced output.

The M1 Plus has a 2100 mAh battery inside, allowing for a standby time of 270 hours as well as up to 12.5 hours of use off the single-ended output and 10 hours with the 4.4 mm balanced output which matched my findings well enough. Charging takes <1 hour with a fast charger, with the volume wheel indicator light turning red when charging—you can have it be green or blue otherwise, it does not change based on playback rate/type as with some other sources. Shanling also claims a highly respectable 24 hours as a pure Bluetooth transmitter, with a Qualcomm SoC providing Bluetooth 5.2 bidirectional connectivity and rich codec support in the form of AAC/SBC/aptX/aptX HD/LDAC. You can also use this as a USB DAC/amp, providing up to 32-bit, 384 kHz in addition to DSD256 playback. Note that you may need the Shanling USB drivers installed for this though. Natively off the player, you get up to 32-bit, 768 kHz in addition to DSD512 playback. Also, there's a companion app for your phone called Shanling Eddict Player available on Android and iOS platforms allowing you to remotely control playback on the M1 Plus, but I really don't see the point when this is so portable and likely to be in your hands anyway. Another thing to be aware of is the M1 Plus doesn't like to be used when charging, meaning the battery will always be in use. I wish there was an option to bypass the internal battery when you are, say, at a desk with easy access to power.


The Shanling M1 Plus measures quite well for a device in this price/size segment, and the overall sound signature is clean and analytical, perhaps a touch dry. I honestly can't expect much more here, knowing the M1 Plus is not a high-end DAP and is intended to provide a highly convenient listening experience on the go. There's no coloration to the sound thus, and thus I also didn't notice anything extra going on in terms of subjective changes to how dynamic tracks sound or whether the soundstage is now automatically wider as some might say. In fact, even the Bluetooth experience was more than satisfactory to where I do see the M1 Plus hanging well with many portable DAC/amps too. Knowing this is a player with a responsive display on top makes it better. I personally have a lot of local music files as mentioned before, so being able to forego the phone with my IEMs of choice is a nice touch. Battery life isn't bad either for this device, especially since I found myself using the 3.5 mm output more often than not. Shanling does try to boast the 661 mW power output as among the highest, if not the very highest, in its class, yet I suspect most people don't realize how little power most IEMs and headphones actually need. Given this is not a full review, I'll end things by saying the Shanling M1 Plus is a compelling device—especially for its asking price—with some compromises. If you are interested in purchasing one, the Shanling M1 Plus currently sells for $209 from the Shanling store, and the same from authorized vendors, with the case bundle costing $5 more.