Our favorite elite Hi-Res music player has a record-low Black Friday deal – are you ready to go audiophile?

Fiio M23 music player with a sign saying Price Cut
(Image credit: Fiio / Future)

We've found an excellent Black Friday deal on one of our favorite Hi-Res Audio players, the FiiO M23: right now, you can get the Fiio M23 for $649 at Amazon, down from the usual $699.

Shop Amazon's full Black Friday sale

(Not in the US? There's a UK alternative below too – and you can see today's best Fiio M23 prices in your region below)

Today's best FiiO M23 Black Friday deal in the US

FiiO M23 Hi-Res music player
FiiO M23 Hi-Res music player: was $699.99 now $649 at Amazon

We've checked the historical prices and this is a rare price drop: this excellent Hi-Res Audio player usually retails for $699 and is rarely discounted. The M23 is a pocket rocket with a great DAC, a powerful desktop mode for more demanding headphones, and a big battery; in our FiiO M23 review we praised its "balanced, eloquent and entertaining sound" and its excellent build quality.

Today's best UK Black Friday deal on a Hi-Res Audio player

Activo P1
Save 38% (£150)
Activo P1: was £399 now £249 at Amazon

This is a really good price for a Hi-Res Audio player that was already fantastic value for money. In our Activo P1 review we said that the P1 delivered the sound quality you'd expect from portable audio master Astell & Kern (Activo is a sub-brand of A&K) for an exceptionally low price, and right now it's even lower. It's "beautifully musical... with sonic superpowers." If you've been put off by the high price of Hi-Res, this is a great buy.


We really like Fiio's devices: they deliver very high specifications and performance without also charging sky-high prices, and while $649 is still a lot of money it's considerably less than many similarly specced rivals.

In our FiiO M23 review we were almost moved to poetry: it's "delicate yet muscular, assertive yet subtle, lavishly detailed and vaultingly dynamic," we said. It's a large, lavishly specified and beautifully made digital audio player that can power wired headphones, stream to wireless ones, upgrade your computer's audio or be the DAC in a desktop audio system. It's a player of many talents.

In our review, we described its sound quality: "It can punch hard if your music demands it, but never in an uncontrolled manner, and it can give the emotion and attitude in an unaccompanied voice absolutely explicit expression.... it’s the real deal." The only real negative is the lack of on-board storage – at just 64GB that's pretty skimpy – but there's a microSD slot that'll take cards up to 2TB, which is much better.

Shop more of today's best Black Friday sales

CATEGORIES
Carrie Marshall

Contributor

Writer, broadcaster, musician and kitchen gadget obsessive Carrie Marshall has been writing about tech since 1998, contributing sage advice and odd opinions to all kinds of magazines and websites as well as writing more than twenty books. Her latest, a love letter to music titled Small Town Joy, is on sale now. She is the singer in spectacularly obscure Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind.

You must confirm your public display name before commenting

Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.