Meet the M21

Around 2010 via a number of no longer with us download sites apart from Amazon, music in the form of digital audio files arrived not that "audiophiles" really cared for it given many were still unhappy with the root of them, the Compact Disc and back then pretty any and all downloads were "lossy" Mp3's or Apples Aac's designed to take over from dodgy sites.

I bought a Sansa Clip+ to play some on while travelling on the bus although you had to swap files out due the limited memory.

To be fair they did sound a bit better for having higher bit rates as some  of those other sites were chasing getting the most files on the limited  memory capacity back then but in time software came available to make as a good as cd copies of them and more sites offered cd quality downloads.

Then around the fall of 2014 and into 2015 the so-called High Definition download arrived that could sound better than cd and more like the Super Audio cd without having to upgrade both the player and disc catalogue so I had a Fiio X3 MkI and later on a X3 Mk II which added a jogging wheel to scroll with and the cheap but great for the money X1 that took a few less necessary functions off but offered much of that units performance.

Given my dexterity issues Smartphones were unusable I bypassed the listening on the phone stage of the late 2010's and 2020's.

I do buy HD downloads and have them backed up because I find a good many especially classical ones do sound better than cd on good equipment and as they take up more space per album the 128gb limit of those earlier Fiio's was getting restrictive.

I needed a good player that could use the now more available and cheaper high capacity cards of anything from 256gb to 1 tb (series bigger than Windows computers own memory and recently the M21 has dropped in price making a great replacement for my player loaded with Classical music  and has 64gb of it's own memory.

That's now in the system with the messed up FX1221 making it's way to scrap having a host of issues.

kk