Today, Shanling’s official Weibo channel released the rendering of the new portable M3X HiFi player. They indicated that the product will be officially released next week. According to the picture, the product will run the Android operating system. It will also have a large-area touch screen on the front, and the classic volume knob on the right side. The design is the same as previous products.
According to the content displayed on the screen, the M3X HiFi player system can install a variety of third-party Android apps. The back of the fuselage has a small Hi-Res gold label and Hi-Res Wireless certification. It means that the product will support high-quality Bluetooth audio protocols such as aptX HD and LDAC. In addition, the back of the fuselage also shows that the charging supports 5V 2A input. Its power consumption is much smaller than that of smartphones. There is not so much demand for fast charging.
The M3X uses a brand new DAC, and at the same time gives support for the hard-decoding MQA audio format. There are not many chips that support hard MQA decoding on the market. The ES9281PRO DAC of the US ESS company supports MQA hard decoding. So, its dynamic range will reach 124 dB, and THD+N (total harmonic distortion plus noise) is -112dB. The Shanling M3X will have this DAC. But the official has not announced detailed configuration information. MQA encoding technology is being used by more and more online music platforms.
This format folds and compresses audio information and stores it in the signal. The efficiency is much higher than that of FLAC and APE formats. When playing music, the DSP chip of the device decompresses and expands the signal. Then it sends it to the DAC chip that supports hard decoding. Not only that, the MQA format also supports copyright control functions, and audio files contain digital signatures. According to Shanling’s official poster, M3X supports DSD 5644.8 KHz/ 1bit encoding, and the MQA indicator lights up.