In October 2020 a disastrous fire broke out at AKM’s factory in Japan, with a significant impact on availability of AKM DAC chips. This unfortunately led to discontinuation of certain models, shortage of DAC chips on the whole market and extreme price increase in some cases. AKM DACs were important part of Shanling’s audio designs for many years, being the core component in all of our higher positioned portable players. At the time of fire, Shanling had sufficient stock of all different DAC’s to keep the production going, but also knew that they would be forced to switch to a different supplier. Shanling M6 Android player will be the first product to undergo this change. The new M6 21, will be released in April 2021.
What is different on M6 (21)?The new M6 (21) will feature a pair of ESS Sabre ES9038Q2M DACs. The complete amplifier circuit had to be adapted to fit this new DAC architecture. MQA support has been added to the M6 (21).
Shanling M6 (21) MSRP t.b.a