Introducing Shanling M8T - New Flagship Portable Android Player with Tubes

[Shanling]

Every time shut the M8T down it closes out the song i'm playing I have the resume switch on and it still does it am I doing something wrong am I missing a setting.

I noticed that my IEM's need to be turned up to 65 tp 70 to get the same volume as the M5 Ultra on 25 to 40 both are on medium gain is this normal even the M6 pro,M6 pro 2021 and M6 ultra runs about 50 volume to get same results

last the M8T is called the flagship dap why is the software for it much less as good as all the ones I showed above like no gapless and other features

Resume Function in my experience works alright, both for shutting down the app and the whole device. Are you on firmware V1.13?

For gain, you can't be comparing them this way, as different units will have different volume curves and gain settings.
For power comparison, the most objective would be to run all the units at full volume and at highest gain. Anything else and you are introducing other settings that will differ between units.

If you wish to use gapless, we can only recommend to use some 3rd party music player. our software never implemented gapless playback into our app. We only offer gapless on our MTouch system.

 

[PesNewbie]

If I am not using the case, is there concern of dust collecting near the tubes? If so it's impossible to clean. Any advice?

 

[smirks_audio]

Got my M8T in yesterday and I've been listening to it all day on H gain and transistor mode using my Storm.

Great synergy, plenty dynamic, powerful, and resolving. Slightly timbrally colored/warm with snappy transients. Very pleasant overall. Some nitpicks are that the layering is just okay, and the stage depth isn't super convincing. I wish the notes had a little bit more weight on them as well, but for the MSRP, M8T is a home run IMO.

I've been playing with the low-pass filter mode and settled on the super slow roll-off. The sharp roll-off setting got a hair fatiguing on some tracks.

Thankfully haven't run into the 2x speed issue yet either.

 

[doors97426]

thank you for your responce still not resuming play back I got resume playback on automatic libary off does it need to be on, folder skip off yes i'm on 1.13

just restarted my M8T it went to a blank white screen and it is still on what do i do how do you do a reset or something

got it to restart but it never goes back to the last song like the other Shanling players I have

 

[mt877]

Hi @Shanling, Is there a discrepancy with the battery charging capacity? I charged the battery to 100% and opened 2 applications to check the battery.

Device Info HW app shows Power profile of 8350mAh and a Kernel profile of 3500mAh, so is the kernel blocking a full charge of the battery?

Chargie app shows the reported capacity as 8350mAh and a Full charge capacity of 3430mAh, so again the battery is not being full charged to 8350mAh even though the battery charge level shows 100% charged.

Maybe this is a firmware glitch?

EDIT: Also it would be great if the screenshot capability wasn't removed from the basic Android. I had to run another app to capture the screen grabs.

EDIT#2: I found some info from Google Android Help that the battery level may not be showing accurately and was suggested to charge cycle the battery to 100%, use the device until it shuts off by itself, then to perform another full charge to 100%. Afterwards the battery level for 100% hopefully match up with the full capacity of the battery. I've noticed the battery life of this new DAP is not matching the runtime specs. I will give the charging cycle a go and see what happens. Has anyone else noticed poor battery runtime?

 

[Shanling]

thank you for your responce still not resuming play back I got resume playback on automatic libary off does it need to be on, folder skip off yes i'm on 1.13

just restarted my M8T it went to a blank white screen and it is still on what do i do how do you do a reset or something

got it to restart but it never goes back to the last song like the other Shanling players I have

If you encounter device freezing, you can hold the power button for 2x 15 seconds, it will force restart.

For the white screen freeze, it was solved by software team and fix is coming in next firmware.

Will check further on the resume function.

Hi @Shanling, Is there a discrepancy with the battery charging capacity? I charged the battery to 100% and opened 2 applications to check the battery.

Device Info HW app shows Power profile of 8350mAh and a Kernel profile of 3500mAh, so is the kernel blocking a full charge of the battery?

Chargie app shows the reported capacity as 8350mAh and a Full charge capacity of 3430mAh, so again the battery is not being full charged to 8350mAh even though the battery charge level shows 100% charged.

Maybe this is a firmware glitch?

EDIT: Also it would be great if the screenshot capability wasn't removed from the basic Android. I had to run another app to capture the screen grabs.



EDIT#2: I found some info from Google Android Help that the battery level may not be showing accurately and was suggested to charge cycle the battery to 100%, use the device until it shuts off by itself, then to perform another full charge to 100%. Afterwards the battery level for 100% hopefully match up with the full capacity of the battery. I've noticed the battery life of this new DAP is not matching the runtime specs. I will give the charging cycle a go and see what happens. Has anyone else noticed poor battery runtime?

Our system has screenshot function. Swipe three fingers over the screen.

For the battery indicators from 3rd party apps, we know it can sometimes show strangely on our players. For example, ONIX XM10 Waltz also shows the 8340 mAh battery even if the inner battery is just 4000 mAh. It's simply not accurate for our devices.

 

[McCol]

@mt877

I've not tried any apps to measure battery however I can say that battery life has been more or less what is advertised
It's probably the best battery performance I've experienced in a DAP

 

[mt877]

Our system has screenshot function. Swipe three fingers over the screen.

For the battery indicators from 3rd party apps, we know it can sometimes show strangely on our players. For example, ONIX XM10 Waltz also shows the 8340 mAh battery even if the inner battery is just 4000 mAh. It's simply not accurate for our devices.

Thank you for the screenshot tip. It is not mentioned in the M8T Tech Support > User Guide or Tech Support > FAQ. Are there any other helpful Android gestures to share?

@mt877

I've not tried any apps to measure battery however I can say that battery life has been more or less what is advertised
It's probably the best battery performance I've experienced in a DAP

I'm going through the charging cycle process right now to see if the battery level gets calibrated. I guess this is a phenomena with Android devices, though I've had pretty good luck with the battery charge level on other Android devices so far.

EDIT: Here's the battery level after the full charge, full discharge and another full charge routine to reset the battery charge level.
I would say that a 3rd party app is capable of showing an accurate charge level. Now 100% = Full charge of 8350 mAh.

 

[MatW]

I just received this player and I like it a lot. I do have one more bug to report. I understand the LED light around the volume button should indicate the bit rate, although there is no mention of it in the small manual.

With streaming services like Qobuz and Tidal the light is blue all the time, no matter the bit rate of the files played, hi res, 44/48/96 etc. When I play music through UAPP or the Shanling player I get an orange/yellow light for hi res files initially, but after a while it goes back to blue and stays there, irrespective of the file type.

Edit: my unit is working as designed, see the exchange below.

 

[solstice15]

For anyone who's heard both, is the M8T an 'upgrade' relative to the M9 (not plus) or more of a different flavor? Is it less resolving?

 

[Shanling]

I just received this player and I like it a lot. I do have one more bug to report. I understand the LED light around the volume button should indicate the bit rate, although there is no mention of it in the small manual.

With streaming services like Qobuz and Tidal the light is blue all the time, no matter the bit rate of the files played, hi res, 44/48/96 etc. When I play music through UAPP or the Shanling player I get an orange/yellow light for hi res files initially, but after a while it goes back to blue and stays there, irrespective of the file type.

I just tested it on my unit of M8T, running Tidal V2.147. The system correctly reports sampling rate in status bar and wheel changes colour accordingly.
Can you please check if the status bar sampling rate indicator changes correctly on your unit depending on the Tidal file? That's the main thing to pay attention to, that one ensures the correct playback.

(Only exception would be some Tidal files that for some reason are detected and played as MQA, but that's question up for Tidal and what they do)

For anyone who's heard both, is the M8T an 'upgrade' relative to the M9 (not plus) or more of a different flavor? Is it less resolving?

In my personal opinion:

Both M9 and M9 Plus are still our best sounding players (most resolving, most layered, best control), but on both their tuning was a bit different from our standard, much more towards neutral.

M8T would be warmer, more relaxed, especially when run with tubes enabled.

In this case it really depends on matching with Earphones/headphones and user preferences.

I personally prefer neutral sound and use M7 / M9 Plus, while many of my colleagues would pick M8T over them.

- Frankie

 

[MatW]

I just tested it on my unit of M8T, running Tidal V2.147. The system correctly reports sampling rate in status bar and wheel changes colour accordingly.
Can you please check if the status bar sampling rate indicator changes correctly on your unit depending on the Tidal file? That's the main thing to pay attention to, that one ensures the correct playback.

Thanks for checking. What colors should I be seeing? Is there a table? I did some more testing and now I am getting the yellow color, with frequencies over 48k. But 16/44, 24/44 and 24/48, which are the most common in my library, are all blue.

 

[sofastreamer]

same bt hardware and implementation as with the m1s plus?

 

[Shanling]

Thanks for checking. What colors should I be seeing? Is there a table? I did some more testing and now I am getting the yellow color, with frequencies over 48k. But 16/44, 24/44 and 24/48, which are the most common in my library, are all blue.

It shows color based on sampling rate, not bit rate, so all the 16/44.1 or 24/44.1, 24/48 will show the same blue.

It's Orange for 88.2-196. Then Purple for higher. And green for DSD.

same bt hardware and implementation as with the m1s plus?

No, completely different Hardware and standard Android implementation.

 

[MatW]

It shows color based on sampling rate, not bit rate, so all the 16/44.1 or 24/44.1, 24/48 will show the same blue.

It's Orange for 88.2-196. Then Purple for higher. And green for DSD.

Ok, thank you. Then I think my unit is working as designed. I guess I expected to see a difference between 16 and 24 bit. I don't have anything higher than 192k, so blue and orange is what I will be seeing. Thanks again for the information.