Fiio DM13

To all of you that use digital music devices, portable CD players are hardly anything new. I remember teenage me in the early 90’s walking around with my ‘Discman’ and headphones, desperately trying to walk without a bounce so as to avoid the tracks skipping! Thankfully the technology has moved on somewhat so that tracks skipping halfway through playing is a rare occurrence these days (this device makes use of Electronic Skip Protection) and the focus can now be on sound quality and depth.

Fiio have pulled out all the stops when it comes to the quality of sound with the DM13. Firstly, there are not one but two CS43198 DAC chips which ensures a smooth 99-step volume transition and a specially designed output stage to better capture the sound. The sound quality therefore, remains the same no matter the volume level. Of course, there’s not a lot of point in this if you can’t actually listen to the output so, as well as driving the majority of headphones out there (with both 3.5 and 4.4 mm outputs as well), you can also take advantage of powered speakers or headphone amps to really make the most out of the musical output. You also get all the usual things you expect with a music player – playback looping (individual tracks or the whole CD), gapless playback and random selection, great for those compilation CD’s you inevitably get at Christmas time!

One of the functions that I really like about this disc player however is the ability to rip your CD’s. Simply attach it to your PC with the provided USB-A to C cable (also doubles up as the charging cable of course) and rip away! The resultant WMA files are fine if using Microsoft software or devices but not quite as versatile as MP3’s. However, it’s relatively easy to convert them if you wish with a little bit of searching around online. RRP £129.99

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