[Shanling]

Back from trip, quickly going through all posts. I think I got all the unanswered questions, if not, please post them again.

Could someone tell if M5S's own volume can be controlled over Bluetooth (not just reduce phone volume but control target M5S output volume) for best audio quality?

No, volume of M5s is independent from volume on your phone.

Interesting that the reviewer called the M5s dry. It's not particularly dry to me, but I'm pairing it with an IEM that is the definition of liquid and it sounds buttery smooth. I'd be curious to hear people's listening impressions when paired with the Shanling ME100.

From one review, it's like the most musical DAP with killer bass, warm and smooth to the point of almost sounding dark and on another, it's like the most neutral, flat and linear device with bass "as tight as a virgin" to the point of sounding dry.
It's like two ends of the spectrum, aren't reviewers are supposed to have some kind of reference points? Is it possible that the Red version is tuned "slightly" different than the rest?
Oh and if Headfonia could afford a comparison section somewhere in those 4 pages that'd be great.

In my experience as brand representative, people will tell you way different things, even if they listened to the same identical unit, as I saw many times at audio shows.

All boards for M5s are made in one batch, then they will randomly end up with black/grey/red case, so no special tuning of red edition.

I personally wouldn't update to 2.1 so far because it introduces (or in my case, amplifies) an issue in which there would be little or no sound after pausing the player or switching headphones. I reverted back to 2.0 for now and have not experienced such an issue at all after downgrading.

Still trying to find core of this problem.

Anyone tried M5s as DLNA renderer?

In this case it can theoretically sound as good as from SD card as files would be sent intact via WiFi.

I have Plex loaded, but it doesn't really work that way without an app installed on the endpoints.

I can recommend Hi-Fi cast app on Android, it always works nice with my M5s over DLNA.

I have spoken very positively about this player but I really have to wonder if I got a defective unit. I've written before about my experience with the EQ. Today I was listening to Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds Live at Radio City. I had the EQ on and all the bass frequencies set to 1 notch above 0 and it was as if the sound wave just fell apart- The music was SO Degraded both Dave's vocals and his acoustic guitar that it was unlistenable, completely unintelligible and degraded to the point of awful. So just to check, I kept the settings the same and put on Donald Fagan Kamakiriad - and it was fantastic.
I dont know there are just certain frequencies wich just completely fall apart with this player. On some tracks its completely blissful and on others its pure crap. I love the ergonomics, the ui, the baterry and the sound on about 60% of what I listen to, but the 40% is really beginning to irritate me......

Are you experiencing same problem when EQ is turned off?

 

[vodanhkhack]

@Shanling try this:

Play music till the screen is off. Then press the hard button "pause", unplug headphone. Re plug in head phone again after about some minutes. Press power on, press play. Then No sound!!!

 

[Shanling]

@Shanling try this:

Play music till the screen is off. Then press the hard button "pause", unplug headphone. Re plug in head phone again after about some minutes. Press power on, press play. Then No sound!!!

Tried it exactly as you posted, still getting normal volume, no problem.

 

[chasfs]

if not, please post them again.

I made several comments in posts above - and am including them below. I've had to power cycle the M5A every couple of days to clear it out. Sometimes it starts skipping during playback, sometimes it won't connect to Bluetooth, sometimes it has trouble powering off!!

Here's a summary of problems in priority order:

1. Bluetooth pairing is exceedingly slow and gets stuck.
2. Bluetooth doesn't support next or previous track, show album's song list, titles, etc.
3. Replay Gain isn't implemented.
4. Switching from Balanced to Unbalanced headphones dismounted SD card.
5. Adjusting Playback requires backing out of Foilders.
6. Playlists can't be renamed.
7. Favorites only hold songs, not albums or artists.
8. UI is laggy and buggy.
9. OTA Firmware update is very slow
10. Updating Music LIbrary is slow.
11. Mounting USB only on D:

Downloaded firmware V2.1 over wifi. Painfully Slow!

Manually updating the Music Library is slow - several minutes for a 35gb collection.

Mounting as USB on Windows only works as the D: drive even if something else is mounted there!

Bluetooth pairing is flawed. It paired easily with Edifier S1000DB but took many tries with Edifier S2000 Pro. Two tries to pair a 2012 Camry, but the artist and title are not displayed and only play/stop work.

Playlists can't be renamed on the unit but can be created as Playlist1, Playlist2, ....

I did an ota firmware update to 2.1 (slow) on Sunday.
More usability issues today:
Listening to balanced. Pause playback and plug in cable to unbalanced without headphones. Unit is confused - volume is very low on balanced need to unplug both and wait a minute to reset. Then listened to unbalanced. Stopped player and unplugged and changed cable to balanced. Plugged in and started player. Now volume is very low. Waiting a minute seems to fix it. But it is really hard to do A/B comparisons.

Then I tried to switch again and got


Before it got there it said the storage card was unplugged but i didn't get a screen shot of that and the card hasn't moved, the unit was sitting on my desk. It required a power cycle to clear

Ok - I downrezzed to 2.0. Its very much faster to download the zip and put the update.bin on the tf card and do the update from the card, than to do OTA update.

To summarize my 2.1 firmware experiences - the UI is laggy and very prone to getting confused if you "type ahead". If you don't wait for it to finish the current command and press something else - bad things will happen. It gets stuck at a low volume to the point that you can barely hear anything. I've had it unmount the sd card after switching headphones from balanced to unbalanced and hitting play too many times. I had it freeze while trying to shutdown because I changed the volume or hit Yes too many times for Confirm Shutdown. I had it get confused pairing with Bluetooth devices or starting to play on Bluetooth.

Some other things that I find annoying in the UI - Playlists can't be named so I use Folders. But it doesn't remember where you are in the folders - you need to click SD then Music then scroll to find the folder you want. If you swipe left you can get back to Music, but not if you went to Home screen to select Playback to change EQ or Filter. Then swiping left from the current song takes you back Home.

The Favorites only hold songs. I want to make an Album or a Folder a Favorite. Of if I could have named Playlists, make a Playlist a Favorite.

Another thing I ran into is some of my songs don't have the track number in the name. On Windows you can specify the sort order by # which does what I want. But M5s doesn't offer that choice.

 

[mhoopes]

I´m using the M5s with Fiio FH5 and a Fiio LC-2.5C BAL cable. What i am after is a wider Soundstage and a bit leaner (but faster and clearer) lower Frequencies.

The FiiO FA1 might be up your alley. The soundstage isn't really wider than the FH5, but the FA1's imaging is more precise, and its bass is very fast and clean. It might sound a touch lean with some older recordings, but dip your toe into more modern waters, and you won't find it lacking.

 

[deja-vu]

Tried it exactly as you posted, still getting normal volume, no problem.

The statements in the sense of "it works for me - no problem" are neither goal-oriented nor constructive, especially if this problem definitely occurs in reality. On the contrary - one feels with his problem rather misunderstood or left alone.

That is not how it works - this issue was actually one of my reasons to return the M5S.

 

[El Fuinha]

Still on FW 2.0 because of the sound problem.

Updated and reverted to the 2.0.

Waiting for this to be fixed too...

 

[gazzington]

Has the problem with eq been fixed on this dap yet?

 

[Nayparm]

Has the problem with eq been fixed on this dap yet?

Unfortunately not, its a shame I liked it otherwise, nice fast gui and good build. Was like a cross between a shanling M3s and a Sony WM1A in design and gui.
Also that darn little 2.5mm balanced

 

[holsen]

Has the problem with eq been fixed on this dap yet?

No, but I do trust they will come with a solution to everything that has been discussed in this thread. Form those of you experiencing the volume issue (I have not) to this EQ.
I really do believe they are going to introduce a beautiful solution in a coming firmware ...... so I'm hanging in ... let's keep in mind they have just returned to work after a complete shut down of China for Chinese New Year so they are getting caught up

 

[Nayparm]

No, but I do trust they will come with a solution to everything that has been discussed in this thread. Form those of you experiencing the volume issue (I have not) to this EQ.
I really do believe they are going to introduce a beautiful solution in a coming firmware ...... so I'm hanging in ... let's keep in mind they have just returned to work after a complete shut down of China for Chinese New Year so they are getting caught up

I might pick another up if they sort the EQ

 

[Shanling]

I made several comments in posts above - and am including them below. I've had to power cycle the M5A every couple of days to clear it out. Sometimes it starts skipping during playback, sometimes it won't connect to Bluetooth, sometimes it has trouble powering off!!

Here's a summary of problems in priority order:

1. Bluetooth pairing is exceedingly slow and gets stuck.
2. Bluetooth doesn't support next or previous track, show album's song list, titles, etc.
3. Replay Gain isn't implemented.
4. Switching from Balanced to Unbalanced headphones dismounted SD card.
5. Adjusting Playback requires backing out of Foilders.
6. Playlists can't be renamed.
7. Favorites only hold songs, not albums or artists.
8. UI is laggy and buggy.
9. OTA Firmware update is very slow
10. Updating Music LIbrary is slow.
11. Mounting USB only on D:

1. Do you mean pairing or scanning? And with what headphones/speakers? My paired headphones connects to M5s within 5 seconds.
2. With all BT headphones we have, next/previous tracks jumps work without problem.
Song's info sharing is limited due to BT profile used in M5s.
3. Reply gain is on list of features to be added into our system. But no idea when it will be.
4. Interesting problem, never experienced it myself or saw report of this, will forward it to software team.
5. What exactly you mean under "Adjusting playback"? For basic playback controls, side buttons can be used at any time. And going to playback screen is quick, just swipe up to jump to main menu and then click playback bar.
6. Yes, this is missing in current system. But since our system is equipped with keyboard, it might be possible to add it in future firmware update.
7. Whole album or all songs of artist can be added to favorites at once. We are not planning to have separate favorites for artists, albums, genres, composers, etc.
8. We are always working on improving our system as fast as our limited software team can.
9. OTA update is quite new thing for us, so we are still working on improving our servers to make it better.
10. Unfortunate part of our system, trying to improve it through firmware updates and it's quite better than early versions, but still have more work to do on it.
11. On my computer it connects as H, colleagues have it as I and J. So this seems to be some unique problem with your computer?

The statements in the sense of "it works for me - no problem" are neither goal-oriented nor constructive, especially if this problem definitely occurs in reality. On the contrary - one feels with his problem rather misunderstood or left alone.

That is not how it works - this issue was actually one of my reasons to return the M5S.

As I stated in this thread multiple times, we are aware of this problem of lowered volume and were able to reproduce it few times. I followed @vodanhkhack process, but no problem showed up, so there is something more to it.

But I'm getting good news from software team, they think they found cause of it in past few days. We will get new firmware next week and will test it.

 

[holsen]

.

But I'm getting good news from software team, they think they found cause of it in past few days. We will get new firmware next week and will test it.

Keep up the good work and thanks for taking the heat while remaining calm, non defensive and proactive and in your communication with us.

 

[technobear]

1. Mounting USB only on D:

Have you actually gone into the Disk Management control panel and tried to reassign the drive letter?

Control Panel->Administrative Tools->Computer Management->Disk Management

Right-click on the M5s and choose 'Change Drive Letter and Paths...'

 

[chasfs]

1. Do you mean pairing or scanning? And with what headphones/speakers? My paired headphones connects to M5s within 5 seconds.

I switch between pairing with speakers and pairing with a car. If I am not patient scanning doesn't connect. It is hard to go thru the menus to select the Bluetooth for the car while driving!

2. With all BT headphones we have, next/previous tracks jumps work without problem.
Song's info sharing is limited due to BT profile used in M5s.

I'm talking about pairing with a car. I've tried several different cars and the song title, album and assist never show up. This is why I'm returning the M5S.

3. Reply gain is on list of features to be added into our system. But no idea when it will be.
4. Interesting problem, never experienced it myself or saw report of this, will forward it to software team.
5. What exactly you mean under "Adjusting playback"? For basic playback controls, side buttons can be used at any time. And going to playback screen is quick, just swipe up to jump to main menu and then click playback bar.

The context of where we are in the folders is reset after going to playback screen. So swiping left from what's playing goes back to home, not to folder the song is in.

6. Yes, this is missing in current system. But since our system is equipped with keyboard, it might be possible to add it in future firmware update.
7. Whole album or all songs of artist can be added to favorites at once. We are not planning to have separate favorites for artists, albums, genres, composers, etc.
8. We are always working on improving our system as fast as our limited software team can.
9. OTA update is quite new thing for us, so we are still working on improving our servers to make it better.
10. Unfortunate part of our system, trying to improve it through firmware updates and it's quite better than early versions, but still have more work to do on it.
11. On my computer it connects as H, colleagues have it as I and J. So this seems to be some unique problem with your computer?

If I'm in usb mode it seems to use other drive letters. I think this happened in DAC mode.