The beauty of portable music players is their simplicity. Load them up with music, pair them with decent audiophile headphones, and away you go – into the revered sonic realms of portable hi-fi that are often only reached by speaker-fronted systems costing significantly more.
With the FiiO M11S, there is, however, an additional accessory and slight cost you need to factor into its £489 / $499 / AU$819 price tag – a microSD card. While many owners of music players might end up purchasing a storage card to boost internal storage capacity, it’s almost a requirement of buying the M11S, which has a mere 32GB built in – half as many gigabytes offered by the pricier but most entry-level player in Astell & Kern’s catalogue, the SR25 MkII. As that would accommodate roughly 1,000 CD-quality songs, those who have modest libraries, who perhaps also rely on a streaming service, may believe they could get by on that. But when you fire up the player and get stuck into the menus, you soon realise that half of that internal storage is already eaten up by various functions of the player’s Android 10 operating system. And if you want to download any apps such as Tidal (100MB) or Apple Music (45MB) from the Google Play Store, that will leave even less room for your music files. So do budget a little extra for that microSD card, whether it’s a 128GB or 2TB (the maximum supported) one you need.
