Fiio M7 High-Resolution Audio Player Launched in India, Priced at Rs. 19,990

Fiio has launched its M7 Hi-Res Lossless Music Player in India. Priced at Rs. 19,990, the M7 is the successor to the Fiio M3, which we reviewed back in 2016. It is offered in Black, Silver, and Red and will be available for purchase from the company's own website as well as leading e-commerce and retail outlets.

The Fiio M7 has a modest 3.2-inch touchscreen (480x800 pixel resolution), an aluminium chassis, an all glass front, and 2GB of internal storage which can be expanded via a microSD card (of up to 512GB capacity). The player runs on a highly customised Android skin and has physical buttons for playback controls as well as a dial to control the volume.

The Hi-Res music player is powered by Samsung's Exynos 7270 SoC and has a claimed play time of up to 30 hours when connected via Bluetooth and 20 hours via the headphone jack. Its 1180mAh battery is also claimed to offer standby time of 40 days. It is one of the first dedicated music players in the world to have a USB-Type C port which can be used for charging, syncing and music playback over USB-C headphones. There's also a 3.5mm headphone output support.

At the core of the M7 is the ESS Sabre 9018 chip which combines a high-performance DAC and headphone amplifier into one small package. The 9018 chip has a fairly impressive signal-to-noise ratio of -121B and support for up to 384kHz/32 bit PCM tracks.

The M7 not only supports the aptX-HD audio codec, but also supports Sony's LDAC wireless audio codec which was recently made available to all Android smartphones via 8.0 Oreo. You can learn more about Bluetooth streaming codecs here. The audio player supports FM Radio but the lack of Wi-Fi means no support for streaming services like Apple Music and Google Play Music.