Shanling M7 Review

In this article, we review the new Shanling M7 DAP which costs $1,249.

Disclaimer: The Shanling M7 was sent to us directly from Shanling. The review reflects my honest opinion as always.

Shanling

Founded in 1988, Shanling has been developing Hi-Fi products for more than 30 years now. From high-end CD players to classy tube amps, the brand made a name thanks to great craftsmanship and top of the line performance.

Shanling also developed a complete range of players and IEMs. We reviewed almost all of their portable products, including the latest Shanling M9 flagship DAP, which deserved a recommendation from us, rightfully so. It’s a great flagship player with its incredible sound quality and 2K screen. Nano also reviewed lots of Shanling products as well as Yagiz. You can check them out here. 

Shanling M7

The Shanling M7 is simply a portable and more compact version of the flagship M9 player. It is also a continuation of the M8, the previous flagship model before the M9’s arrival. This I think is the new “compact flagship” portable player from Shanling, since they claim that this one has most of M9’s features, squeezed into a smaller footprint.

It features the same 5-inch Full-HD screen as the older M8, but in a sleeker “Wave” design body, measuring 129 x 78 x 20 mm at 312g. However, it has derived certain developments from the bigger brother M9, including the single-piece aluminium inner body and the single-board integrated acoustic design.

Key Specs

The new M7 adopts the new “Wave” Design from the M9, hence it has the same design language as the flagship. Again, just like the M9, the device runs Android 10, with a Snapdragon 665 CPU. The RAM is downgraded to 6 gigs from 8, and the onboard storage is 128GB, instead of 256. Hey, the flagship has to keep some features to itself right? The storage is of course expandable with a MicroSD card.

The battery I guess is the same 7000 mAh battery from the old M8 with 18W quick charging support. The screen again is the M8’s screen, so no big surprise after the huge 2K screen of the M9.

For sound, the M7 is based around ESS Sabre ES9038PRO DAC, so Shanling took a different route after the M8 & 9, which were based on the legendary AK4499. This is an 8-channel DAC Shanling uses in their HiFi line of products, and they claim this experience has worked to their favour in implementing it to a portable player.

Shanling also claims that this is their best measuring player so far, with an ESS ES9311 voltage regulator, a power circuit adapted from the M9 and an in-house developed I/V conversion stage.

Other than that, it has all the regular Shanling features that we got used to; 3 gain settings for the amplifier stage with an “Over-Ear Headphone Mode”, 5G Wi-Fi, DLNA, OTA updates, Bluetooth 5.0 with every codec possible, and remote control features as well as Wi-Fi transfer, Bluetooth DAC and more.

Page 2: Design, Build Quality, Package, User Experience

Page 3: Display, Software, Sound Quality

Page 4: Power & Synergy, Comparisons, Conclusion