Is This Pricey Hi-Res Music Player Worth It? FiiO JM21 Review – Audiophile Android BEAST!

0:00 Hey everybody, welcome back to Recordology. This is going to be awesome. We are taking a look at the JM 21 from FO. We're kind of on this FIO kick if you haven't noticed. We're almost done. We got one more thing after this to review. Some really cool new stuff that they have. This is an MP3 player, but it sort of takes MP3 to the next level because it does so much more. It's a fully functional Android device that punches way above its weight. And I can't wait to check it out. You're not gonna want to miss [Music]

0:45 this. I think it's fair to say that most of us are probably still consuming a healthy amount of digital audio even though we are enjoying a lot of analog these days. And I'm no different. So, I want to have a good MP3 player. I'll explain that in a minute. This is the FIO JM21 packaging on point as per the Uge. And this is high-rescertified as well as high-res audio wireless certified. And as you can see there, it says Jade audio. I don't know what that means, but it is Qualcomm Aptex, Qualcomm Aptex HD, Bluetooth, Hell DAC, as well as AAC compatible. So, let's go ahead get into it and see what we got here. Now, I feel like my little

1:32 magic trick trick of removing the uh the shrink wrap wasn't quite as slick last time. So, I'm going to try a little bit harder this time. All right, that's pretty good. So, let's go ahead and get into Okay, slides out. Apparently, we've got the JM21 moniker right there on the top. The device. Oo, it's a little bigger than I thought it would be. And heavy, too. Heavy is definitely something they consistently do. Um, all right. So, we got foam packing materials, an accessory box within the box. Let me zoom out a bit here so you can see a little better. All right. All right, we've got our silica packet, our little instruction. This looks a lot like what we had in the uh last device. By the

2:18 way, I've been listening more to the SD player. Thanks for telling me how to stop the disc. It's pretty funny that you I couldn't figure that out. Um, all right. So, we got a quick start guide. And that is it for the box. USBC, charging port, and now the piece to resistance. This is not I like the form factor. I like the fact this is the size that it is. Nice. It feels like a cell phone. I mean, it feels like you're holding a mobile device. Very cool. Okay. Digging it. Very much digging it so far. So, FO is is famous for their MP3 players. They have a huge line of MP3 players. And I wanted to show you some of the ones from their website here. They have lossless

3:04 players. They have portables, non-portables, everything in between. All different form factors, use cases. Look at this little one. Looks like an old iPod Shuffle. And it's amazing the variety. Uh they all seem to be really nice. I think there's even more than that, but that's just the ones that I'm seeing on their website. It's $179, which is definitely not chump change. um for an MP3 player. You can go out and buy cheap MP3 players for, you know, 15, 20, 30 bucks on Amazon or eBay all day. But this promises to be something special, something different. This is definitely a quality device. Um, as a point of reference, not only in size, but in use case, I wanted to show you what I'm using. Now, this is my

3:49 daily driver MP3 player. Probably of all the audio devices that I have, including record players, etc., I'm listening to this thing more consistently than anything else in the house. Every single night without fail, I listen to this device. As I've stated before, I like to relax before bedtime by listening to movie audio, TV audio, or ambient sounds. So, I'll make audio recordings of my favorite movies that I own a copy of for my own use and I will load the MP3 onto here and I will just enjoy listening as I fall asleep. It is Bluetooth out so I can use some wireless sleep headphones like the headband kind. You can see it's a little scratched up. I have reviewed this and my overall

4:34 thought process on this is I I do like it, but it's completely touchscreen based. Even this down here, it's flat. There's no physical buttons on the side. Well, there is actually I lied. There's a there's a uh like a mode switch, power switch, and then there's a volume rocker. There are no physical buttons. Now, looking at this, I see the same thing is pretty much happening here. We've got uh you have transport controls on this one. Physical button, transport controls, and on this side, we've got uh a power mode switch as well as volume button. So, I'm hoping there's cuz in the middle of the night, especially if you're doing it blind, it's it's much better to have a physical button because you'll learn where the power button is, where the volume button is. But on this, it lights up. It's beautiful. It works

5:20 does a great job. But your finger, there's no physical tactile interaction going on. Those aren't even micro switch buttons. Those are It's all capacitive touch. I should say this is there's no actual touching on the screen, but down here. So, it's a little annoying in that regard. Sound quality and everything functionality is fine. It's got a onboard storage and SD card storage as well. But anyway, that's what I'm using now and that's what I'm looking to replace hopefully with this. And I really like the form factor. Like that's a good size. I keep saying that, but that's a that's like a perfect size. Kind of feels like an iPhone 4 in comparison. This thing's a little tiny. Now, you don't need I'm not here to watch a bunch of visual content on the device. I want to get it set quickly and then I want to put it down and fall

6:05 asleep. Uh but the display the the UI needs to be, you know, easy to navigate. This one once you kind of learn its quirks, it's it's fine. But this is is kind of dinky. It's kind although this is built well. I believe it has a glass front and back. I mean, it is it is also hefty for its size, but this is just a good size. It's almost as big as my iPhone. Now, one thing that I love about this that I can't stand about the iPhone, you say, "Why don't you just load your music on here?" You know, I listen to Apple Music on here. Why don't you just load everything on here? Cuz this is, you know, a fancy MP3 player, too. Everybody's phone is. I don't want notifications. I don't want to be connected to the outside world when I'm listening at night. I want to be disconnected. I don't want any notifications. No pop-ups, no text messages. I want to, you know, completely be disconnected from the

6:52 world. Can't do that with this very well because, uh, you know, I have to physically be able to take call. I could silence it and I have to sometimes, but I have to be connected with this device to some degree because, you know, what if one of the kids has a problem or something, you know, family issues, whatever, uh, can come up. Work emergencies have to be able to be connected. I really want the phone to be a communications device more than anything. So, anyway, the one thing about this though is it does have Wi-Fi connectivity. So, it is kind of stepping over into the territory of being a fullyfledged device. I plan on having it disconnected from any network or connectivity once I get it configured and set up, but you can do upgrade like

7:37 firmware updates and stuff with the Wi-Fi connectivity. All right, let's tour the device. We have on the bottom here three connections. We have a 3.5 mm headphone jack, which also doubles as a line output and a coaxial output. We got the USBC charging port and we have a 4.4 mm balanced audio output as well. Now, if we look on this side, we've got this power switch. There's an indicator light, and there's a volume up and down. Nothing on the top side. On this side, we have a TF/ SD card slot, forward and back skip on the buttons, as well as a play pause. Finally, let's turn this thing on. We're going to press and hold. I've got the fold light happening right

8:22 now. By the way, FIO is the parent brand. Jade Audio is one of their subbrands. Kind of like Snowki with those headphones we were looking at the other day. So, we This is easily viewable. So far, I've only got the red logo, but so far it's easily viewable in daylight. This has like a crazy amount of uh battery capacity, so you'll be able to listen to this the way I do, maybe an hour or two a night, maybe three hours a night. Sometimes I'll sleep the whole night with the thing playing. Usually I wake up about an hour and a half afterwards and I I shut it off, but I'll probably be able to get days if not weeks out of this. Um, so let's scroll down to English, which is going to be my preferred language, and select. Okay. Oo, look at that. It's got a wallpaper. They're very proud of their

9:08 op amps, and you hear me talk about that quite a bit. So, this is running on Android, and you know, it looks like it. It's got a Play Store. There's a couple different applications that are installed. It is very much like an Android cell phone. And it's got gestures just like a phone does. You can swipe up from the bottom to go between screens, recent items. You can Let's see. I'm still learning. I'm also an Apple person, so I haven't been on an Android phone in a while. I do have an Android tablet, a couple of them, which I like Android a lot, but I'm not as I'm not quite as used to the uh to the Android way of doing things. But you can swipe right, swipe left. There's a number of gestures. You can pinch and zoom out. Uh, it's got a browser. It's got all this stuff. So, let's dive into

9:53 the actual software and the MP3 capability. Oh, yeah. I wanted to show before I forget just how cool this back panel looks. That is really, really cool. And it comes with this clear protective case. And you can pop that off. And I'm probably not going to do that because I just like the idea of it being on. I would want that anyway. So, I'm going to leave it on, but you can remove that. I love this beautiful blue color as well. It also comes factory installed with a screen protector. It's installed at the factory, so that's a really good thing as well. So, yeah, let me go ahead and load some content on here, and then we'll talk through the various functions. Okay, time has gone by, several hours now, and I've spent a lot of time with this thing. I'm going to show you. We're still going to look

10:39 at it, but my first impressions are that it's very robust and it's basically like having a storage device and a cell phone and an MP3 player and a tablet and pretty much a phone allin one. It's it's a very mult. It's much more, you know, there's many more things you can do with this than my old MP3 player. That being said, I'm very much looking forward to the added functionality. Couple quick notes. Um, I did have a couple of issues with it disconnecting when I was transferring files. I did load a lot of stuff on here. It's got approximately 20 or 22 gigs of internal storage. Um, and about 18 of that are available. I've got everything that I need on this like 32 gig SD card slot.

11:25 So anyway, I did notice that when it was transferring files for like long periods of time, it I was having a couple of times where it would disconnect and I have to unplug it and replplug it in, but that totally could have been my computer. I've got a very poorly performing computer right now, so I'm actually going to go ahead and say that was probably my computer more than it was this. Um, also they a lot of devices these days have what's called an oolophobic coating on the glass, meaning that it resists fingerprints. This apparently does not. So, it's very fingerprint heavy, if that makes it attracts fingerprints quickly, and even the back does. And by the way, this is like a TPU rubberized case, so you can just pop it off if you don't like this uh protective case. I'm going to leave it on. Um, but I did want to show you that does come off easily. Um, I'm not

12:12 sure this is aluminum. I'm not sure if I think the bottom piece may be plastic, but the blue is aluminum glass. Obviously, it's a very hefty unit. like I've kept I keep saying over and over. Um, okay. Let's go ahead and take a look at the operating system and the menu interface. Okay. So, to bring it to life, you just press that little button right there. I mean, it it's essentially an Android tablet, like a microscopic Android tablet. You swipe up from the bottom. And from here you've got the typical Android interface with the time, the date, whatever apps you've loaded here. And then you can go over here and, you know, it's got the basic uh Android apps that you would get. I also added YouTube, TuneIn Radio. It's got the Google Play Store, so you can add anything you want really. Also, there's

12:59 a FIO control app. If you have other FIO devices, you can control it. I've got Apple Music. We'll do a direct feed sound test as well. I'll use the Apple Music, but that'll allow you to hear the chips and whatnot that are on board cuz most of the audio I've loaded on here is low res cuz I listen to oldtime radio, ambient sounds, things that are not like super high res. So, it's kind of ironic that I've got it on a high- res player, but um the Apple Music being lossless will be a really good test of that. You can swipe down from the top and switch modes and just put it it defaults to Android mode which is you know Android operating system but you can go to pure music where it shuts off everything no notifications and you're just in the music player itself and that's everything everything is the music

13:45 player. There's nothing else to it. And then you can change that to airplane mode if you want to do airplane and it just brings it up like an airplane control device. Um, you can exit that and go over to um DAC mode if you want to use it as a DAC. You can go to Bluetooth receiving mode if you want it to do that. And that brings up a really good question. How about Bluetooth transmission mode? So, if I want to connect it to Bluetooth headphones, Bluetooth transmission mode, you just, you know, go down here, go to Bluetooth, and then you can pair the device. It's pretty simple like that. But going back into the player, Fio Music app, it's a really cool app. It's

14:31 very Androidy, you know what I mean? It's not There's a lot of controls. There's a lot of buttons. There's a lot of things you can do. Obviously, you've got a lot of control in here. So, if I go over here, you can create an account. You can log in. You've got uh theme options, EQ options. So, you can go in here and adjust different EQ settings. You can play with sound effects, balancing. There's just so many different things. Sleep timers, so many different settings. I mean, this is a very fully featured uh device. Like I said, I've got an SD card in there. There's also internal storage, which I'm just leaving as system storage right now. So, if I click on the SD card, it's going to bring up uh whatever

15:17 folder system I have on there. Right now, I've got library one and two. So, if I click on one, it's going to bring up the different folders that I have. So, I've got a lot of radio, a lot of vintage music and things. So, let's go to Bing Crosby miscellaneous. Got some radio shows on here. So, if I click on that, it will load the player. And the player loads at the bottom, as you can see. So, if I zoom out here a little bit and I tap down here, it's going to bring up this screen, which will have album art if it's available. Otherwise, it'll use one of the default ones. I picked this record player looking one. That's kind of the best. You got transport controls. You can heart songs. You can put them into playlists. All the stuff you would expect. Very similar to like uh Android music or Apple Music, something like that. You can even divide

16:03 up your songs by bit rate, which is pretty interesting, the sampling rate. So, there's a lot of different ways to slice and dice it. Again, it's very Androidy, so it's there's a lot of things you can do to fiddle around with things and uh do the same task in multiple different ways. So, if you look, there's four different options down here. So, this like record player thing is obviously the the media player itself. If you go over here, it's your favorites list. You can go here and connect to a media server if you want. And then this right here is where you would log in with your account. You can create a FIO account and also in here you can choose some different themes. So there's different theme options for the look of the device. I've got the deep black option and then the default album

16:48 cover display. Like I said, there's some built it defaults to this one here, sort of a concert crowd and I changed it to this record play or you can upload an image of your own. So again, this is really overkill for what I'm going to be doing with it because you can get into videos, other applications, any Android app you can probably run on this, games, potentially things I'm never going to do. I just want a solid MP3 player. So anyway, that's the gist of it. I don't want this to be a 5-hour long video talking about an MP3 player. You know what they what they're for, what they do, but I do want to demonstrate it in some way. So what I'm going to do is focus on the hardware. So, this thing runs on Android 13. It's got a Snapdragon processor with eight cores.

17:34 It's got two of the FIO flagship chips. And they go into incredible detail on their website talking about uh the almost infinite list of file formats that this thing is compatible with, the powerful headphone amplifiers, the focus on sound quality, the premium circuitry, etc. Even the transistors are the best kind of transistors. So what I think would be best is really to demonstrate the hardware more than the software. Um obviously this is a very software heavy device. It's very you know the touchscreen gooey is is Android so it's very complex like we keep saying. So let's let's let's listen to the DAC. Let's listen to the the actual audio coming out of this. And to do that I'm just going to listen to some Kevin McClead with you guys over the headphone

18:20 jack through Apple Music. Okay. I get a lot of grief saying his name wrong and I think I already did in the video. Kevin McCloud. Okay, there. I think that's the first time I've ever said it right. I want to point out too that at least in Apple Music, it does this cool thing where it changes the look the I think it's an Apple Music thing where it changes the color of the interface to match the color of the album, which is really cool. So, if I go over to here and I'm playing a song. Oops. Hit play there. Then I go here. See the color changed? So, I think that's a that's a neat feature for sure. Okay, direct feed sound test time. Please put your headphones on. You are directly connected to the FIO JM21 recorder. And here we go.

19:06 [Music] What? plate. I think that this is a very cool device. I have since moved off of

19:54 my other device. Everything that was on there is now on here and uh tonight will be the first night that I really listen to it critically. Let me jump in right here really quick. So, it's the next morning as of the filming of this clip, as I'm editing the video. It was fine. It worked really good. There was no problems with it whatsoever. I was really impressed, too, how quickly remembered the Bluetooth connection. As soon as I turned on my Bluetooth headphones, it connected to them immediately. Much better than the other unit. So, after the first night, it's still like a really good unit in my opinion. I'm going to say two thumbs up. This is a great little unit. It appears to be anyway. So, battery life is supposed to be over 12 hours. Everybody says it's got great reviews. So, I'm really looking forward to having this. I'm thankful um that I've had an

20:40 opportunity to upgrade. The old player was fine for what it was. Not perfect. I'm sure this isn't perfect either, but it is definitely a step up. It is a bit pricey, but in terms of high-res uh quality MP3, and I keep saying MP3, but I'm just using that as a blanket kind of Kleenex term for digital audio player. They're calling them DAPs now. So, a quality DAP, digital audio player that plays so many different file types, lossless. You can even play Sony DSD files, direct stream digital files on this. The complex or the uh compatibility is insane. It's absolutely insane. So, uh, my little wimpy low bit rate MP3s will not be a problem for this. But that's going to do it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. I mean, it's awesome. What can I say? It's

21:25 completely awesome. If you're interested, two thumbs up. I'll put a link in the description below. Let me know how you consume digital music, specifically nonstreaming digital music. If you do listen to MP3, waves, whatever the case may be, how do you consume that? What device are you listening on? Let me know in the comments. Don't forget you guys, we've got custom 45 adapters. We've got all sorts of merch, and you are cordially invited to join our $1 a month membership program for exclusive content and other awesome benefits. But mostly, I just want to say a huge thank you to you for being there and spending time with us. That's going to do it for today. Happy record hunting and we'll see you next time.