If I’m synthesizing the sonic impressions right, both DAPs lean towards “Warm, punchy, intimate, and a little romantic,” but the Onkyo reviews make a bit more mention of soundstage and refinement, while the M3s surprises with its power.
Interesting description...
For me, I find the Onkyo can sound very different by changing the Filter settings and the Lock Range Adjustment.
Not sure how familiar you are with the DAC process, but in short, these are not additional stages of processing like DSP or EQ (more commonly found in A&K, iRiver, etc.) but they are settings which change the behaviour of crucial stages to convert a digital signal to an analog one for playback.
For some people it's a subtle thing, but for me, it's a much bigger difference than EQ or DSP (which I generally avoid).
Time for a terrible analogy.
EQ/DSP is post-processing. It's like seasoning, adding salt/pepper (EQ) or ketchup (DSP) after the dish is already cooked and prepared. You might get a quick fix to a problem (e.g. if it tastes bland, you can make it saltier), but ultimately you've messed up the dish beyond repair and you're just trying to hide the fault of the dish. It'll never taste amazing with this approach alone, so to me, I actually consider EQ/DSP pretty useless.
Filter and LRA settings is actually changing how it's cooked. If you saute it first before you bake it, or if you caramelize the onions before you add the meat. There's pros and cons to each choice, and your choices may vary depending on the style of music you like, or just how you hear things. I play drums (and record music) so I can't help but focus on hi-hats and how they sound in the space of a room. Other people don't notice the hi-hats, say, a vocalist might focus more on how sibilant the "t" and "s"s are, and find that distracting.
For me, the Filter/LRA settings drastically change the soundstage and in particular, the sound and time smearing artifacts on drums and the presence of instruments in general.
I'm not familiar with the settings available on the Shanling M3. My understanding is there is only 2 filter options (Slow/Sharp) while the Onkyo has 3 filter options (Slow/Short/Sharp)*. I think the Shanling doesn't have LRA settings but somebody more familiar with the player can chime in on that.
*Incidentally, my favourite setting on the Onkyo is "Short" filter with as "Narrow" as an LRA as I can get it without skipping. Which is 1 step away from the most Narrow. This has been improving with each firmware upgrade, so I secretly hope that they could make more optimizations in the next few releases so I can actually use full Narrow LRA on 24-bit/192khz files.
