Well having spent a few weeks with this player i thought i would give an overview of what i think,in case other people are thinking of buying this player.
I thought I would do this by doing a comparison with the shozy alien which was selling for the same price and most likely targeting a similar market
In terms of build quality both of these players are very well constructed and very solid - the Aune M1 feels like a solid brick while the alien is more refined and much thinner - surprisingly there is taking away the volume pot on the M1 the length and width is not to different just the alien is so slim- my first impressions were the more favorable toward the alien
The next step was to put some music on - both players require pre loaded SD or micro sd cards and will not connect as a drive on a computer - no big deal except both players are a little bit fussy on the capacity , type and brand of card used
The A1 will not accept class 10 cards and will only accept class 4 or 6 from my experiments while the alien accepted any class but did not like some toshiba class 10 cards i had
Both players experienced glitches with some WAV files - in the case of the M1 the player locks and will not respond while the alien can be forwarded to the next song
The largest frustration however was getting an SD card of music that would be accepted by the M1 as even though i was using wav files converted from flac using the same program, the odd one must have converted with something the A1 did not like - i often had 24gb of music that would play and add some more files and it would lock up - which would require deleting and adding album at a time to find out what was causing the problem - however i persevered with this until i had 3 x 32gb cards loaded with music that played on both players - the alien being the easier to get organised
Next a discovered both players appear to have a 99 file limit in one folder for which the shuffle function works on - and it will not shuffle files past this point even though playing non shuffle mode will play more
The shuffle for the A1 will only work within the folder you are playing from while the alien shuffle functions goes across folders which for me makes the alien a winner in this area
Both players did not like sub folders from my experience
In terms of navigation the alien is limited and while i have had this player for many months i still find it a bit frustrating to get to the folder i want or get the player to go into shuffle mode - the M1 has a very basic interface but you can easily go through a folder and find a song or album you are looking for so this is an advantage of the M1 over the alien
In terms of power the Aune can drive much higher impedance headphones than the alien - for example using a pair of AKG K612 the M1 was able to drive these better than the alien
In terms of battery life the M1 so far has lasted 9-10 hours average while the alien was getting 6-8 hours but the M1 takes much longer to charge
Both players have no line out function for amp so i tried both using the HO to a cayin c5 and fiio E12 - to be honest both players seemed to sound worse when doing this ??
However in the end it comes down to how they both sound - before getting the M1 the alien was my go to portable player for sound quality and i rated this on par or better than my Shanling M3 or Hidzs AP100 for sound quality / enjoyment - now I am not so sure - The M1 sounds very very good and in particular for full size headphones like the K612 and K550 by AKG or my ultrasone 2500pro they have a really great sound -and the M1 produced the best bass response from the K550 than any other player i have unamped
Both of these players are now discontinued so it is likely they will only be found second hand in the near future as clearance stocks run out - however if you like the alien you may well be impressed by this player as well
I did note however it when i first played a song on the M1 it did not sound very good and i left playing until battery ran out and after 8 hours approx the sound appeared to have significantly improved
So do I have a strong preference - no - both sound different , both sound great and both have their strengths and weaknesses and both can invoke a love hate relationship - However as i listen most of the time to music in shuffle mode the Alien is probably the preference
If you are prepared to sacrifice the limitations of the players in terms of interface, file type support, capacity and ease of use they are both a great option for a second player to have very good sound that is on par with far more expensive players
