Review of the Shanling M0s Digital Audio Player: Tiny tunes at a bargain price

Remember the iPod Shuffle or iPod Nano – those tiny music players that were barely bigger than a postage stamp? The Shuffle had no screen, just buttons and music. The 6th generation Nano had a tiny screen, but it was still all about the music. The Shanling M0s is basically a modernized version of the 2010 Nano – also with a touchscreen – and adds USB-C, high-res audio, and even Bluetooth. Best of all, it has expandable storage via a microSD slot, offering significantly more storage than almost any iPod.

7.5

Shanling M0s

How

• Tiny

• Compatible with high-resolution audio

• MicroSD and USB-C

I do not like it

• No key lock

• Not for fiddly fingers

• Occasionally delayed menus

With excellent fit and finish, the M0s feels well-made and has a surprisingly nice design for a small and inexpensive device. You can easily store all your music, even lossless high-res music up to 384kHz at 32-bit, onto a high-capacity microSD card and enjoy hours of music without the need for internet access.

It’s not quite as easy to use as the best portable media players, but the M0s offers some useful high-end features for under $100. Say you have a collection of high-resolution audio files, or even just a collection of MP3s virtually gathering dust, in which case the M0s is an inexpensive way to enjoy them without the distraction or annoyance of an internet connection.

Hardware

• DAC: Cirrus Logic CS43131
• Headphone amplifier power: 60 mW at 32 ohms (specified)
• High-Res compatible: up to 32bit/384kHz
• Bluetooth codecs: aptX, AAC, LDAC (plus the required SBC)
• File formats: DSD, FLAC, WAV, AIFF, MP3, WMA, AAC, M4A
• Storage: microSD
• Battery life: 10h (specified)
• USB DAC mode: Yes
• Screen: 1.54 inches, resolution 240 x 240
• Operating system: Proprietary

The M0s (and to be clear, that’s the M-zero-S) is impressively small for a device with a screen. It’s bigger than a postage stamp, but not by much: 43.8 x 45 x 13.8mm, or in Freedom Units 1.72 x 1.77 x 0.54 inches. A single scroll wheel on the side of the device controls the volume and doubles as a button to turn the M0s on or off. Operating the controls feels like winding a watch and is certainly faster at changing the volume than buttons. I wish there was a lock on it, though, as you could accidentally adjust the volume if it’s bouncing around in your pocket. In the menus, you can add double and triple click functions to the wheel’s button press. You can customize these to play/pause tracks or skip forward or backward.

Inside is a Cirrus Logic CS43131 DAC and 60mW at 32 ohms amplifier, the latter of which is lower than Shanling’s more expensive M0 Pro, which is visually very similar but has a 4.4mm balanced output and 240mW. Although this is primarily a portable media player, you can enable a USB DAC mode that lets you stream higher quality audio from your computer through the M0s. There’s no Wi-Fi or apps. This is an old-school media player: an iPod reborn in 2024.

I don’t think most people would do this, but you can also use the M0s as Bluetooth. Recipient. In this usage, you would connect the M0s to your phone and then plug your wired headphones into the M0s. Seems a bit extreme to me, but the option is there. I couldn’t get the feature to work with my Pixel 7, but Android connectivity and app compatibility can be a wild card.

An extremely rare feature lets you manually select which Bluetooth codec you want, from the basic SBC to AAC, aptX (the standard version only), and even LDAC.

User-friendliness

The small screen makes operating the M0 a little more difficult than, for example, the large screen of the Sony NW-A306. Since you don’t have to struggle through the Android operating system with a slow processor, the overall experience is about the same. The M0s doesn’t run as smoothly as a modern high-end phone, but it scrolls quickly. Maybe too quickly. If you want to listen to a specific song and have a large collection, it can be a bit time-consuming to find and select it. If the UI had a way to select by letter, that would at least make things faster and less annoying.

There is no desktop software, so if you want to create a playlist, you have to do so by selecting the songs in the player’s operating system. This is quite easy, as you can simply swipe to a screen while the song is playing or select a menu that is accessible next to the song name in the main list.

The tiny M0s have a surprising amount of power. At 60mW at 32 ohms, I was able to get adequate volume even from large Audeze LCD-3 planar magnetic headphones. The volume isn’t deafening, but it’s more than necessary and far louder than the Sony NW-A306. If you have particularly hard-to-drive headphones, it might not be enough, but I doubt most people with headphones like that would consider a sub-$100 audio player.

Otherwise, the sound was… well, whatever I put into it. Lossless FLAC tracks sounded great, prehistoric 128kbps MP3s sounded like 128kbps MP3s. A dedicated USB amp might give you marginally better sound, but at a higher price and with less portability. That it doesn’t have the power issues of the more expensive NW-A306 is certainly a win for sound quality.

Music to go

The Shanling M0s are somewhere between the ultra-simplicity of the Sony NW-E394and the far more complex NW-A306. Because it has far more features, most notably Bluetooth and expandable storage, it’s a better deal than the NW-E394, although it’s a little less user-friendly. I wouldn’t give the M0s to an elderly relative looking for portable music, for example, because the screen is just too small to navigate without a lot of dexterity. Plus, the occasionally slow interface sometimes seems to ignore swipes (though disabling the lock screen in the main menu helps).

For someone looking for a reasonably priced music player that is very portable and overall easy to use, the M0s is fantastic. You can enjoy the completely old-fashioned experience with wired headphones or earbuds, and there’s also the Bluetooth option if you want. If you have a large music library, especially FLAC or other high-resolution music, this is a great way to play your music on the go while staying offline.

In addition to covering audio and display technology, Geoff also takes photography tours of cool museums and locations around the world, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, medieval castles, epic 10,000-mile road trips, and more.

Also check out Budget travel for dummieshis travel book and his Best-selling science fiction novel about city-sized submarines. You can follow him on Instagram and YouTube.