Disclosure: The DM13 was provided by FiiO for this review. Please read more about our product review disclosure here.

If you’ve heard of FiiO it’s most likely because you either own or have seen one of their very many excellent desktop, dongle, and portable Bluetooth DACs, as well as their lineup of acclaimed digital audio players. Recently though, they began to expand with what they call the “Musical Renaissance” initiative, by bringing back audio products that have been phased out of the industry or thought to be obsolete. They started with their CP13 cassette player, TT13 turntable, and a soon-to-be-released RR11 radio. Also among these musical renaissance products is their DM13 portable CD player, which is what I’m looking at today. It comes in black, red, white, and silver. There are Bluetooth and non-Bluetooth variants, as well as a variant with a clear window in the lid to see the disc. I have the black Bluetooth version for this review.

If you are like me and grew up with CDs as the dominant musical medium, this probably brings back a ton of nostalgia for the better days of physical media and no music streaming. I mean, I even had several Discman products so that I could listen to CDs wherever I went. That’s why I was very excited to be able to get my hands on the FiiO DM13 to see if they could pull off a modern version of that iconic Discman. Let’s get into the review to see if they succeeded.

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• FiiO DM13
• 3.5mm to coaxial adapter
• USB-C to USB-A adapter
• 4 additional rubber feet
• Manual and warranty information

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The FiiO DM13 has an aluminum shell and looks elegant yet minimalistic. The edges are rounded so it never feels sharp or uncomfortable when holding or carrying it. It has some heftiness to it but is still fairly light at 450g. It’s on the thicker side for a portable CD player, but I would still consider it very portable. There are no real markings on it other than the reflective silver “FIIO” engraving on the top lid, and the white markings above each button.

Other than the sliding eject button on the right side, all of the buttons reside on the front part of the lid, making them easily accessible. The buttons are also aluminum and provide good tactile feedback when pressed. They feel high quality and don’t wiggle or stick when pressed. I did find that they needed to be pressed fairly firmly in order to be responsive.

The front of the DM13 houses a 1.5-inch LCD display, with a 3.5mm single-ended connection on the left side of the display, and a 4.4mm balanced connection to the right.

The back side of the CD player houses all the connectivity options. Starting from the left there is a 4.4mm balanced line out, 3.5mm line out/coaxial/optical combo output, USB-C port, ESP switch, another USB-C port, and the Direct Mode switch. All the connections feel sturdy, and the switches are just slightly raised and have a good amount of resistance to ensure they can’t be accidentally adjusted.

On the bottom, we have four rubber feet which I found to be decently grippy, as well as adding only minimal height to the CD player.

Opening the lid of the DM13 reveals a spacious CD tray, which should prevent any scratches to the disc if violently moved around or dropped.

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The Fiio DM13 may look and feel like a well-built and solid CD player, but none of that will mean anything if it doesn’t do its one job properly, right? Thankfully it does an excellent job at reading and playing CDs. Playing CDs is supposed to be simple and ritualistic, in a way similar to how you have a process for playing vinyl albums on a turntable. Opening your CD case, remove the CD, pop open the lid of the DM13 (which has a nice spring to it), place the disc on the spindle, and finally close the lid. It feels great to do and brings back a lot of memories.

Pressing the power button will power on the DM13 and light up the LCD display. The player will take a few seconds to read the disc and then will start playing automatically. Now, you’re in CD-listening bliss. There is a slight audible sound from the spindle spinning the disc, with an occasional squeak, so the player is not dead silent when playing. It’s not really noticeable most of the time, and really the only times I did notice it was during the quiet parts of songs if I had open-back headphones on, and if I had the player literally right beside me on my desk (video below with sound for those interested). Vibration is also non-existent when the disc is spinning during playback.

The actual playing of CDs is a very smooth experience, and the DM13 has been able to read every single CD I’ve thrown at it, from older CDs released in the 80s to ones released in the last few years. Even CDs I burned 15-20 years ago worked flawlessly. CDs that are unbelievably scratched (I have a few, sadly) the DM13 managed to play without issue, save for one CD where it did skip a couple of seconds during one of the tracks. The CD is scratched though so it’s not the player’s fault, so overall I’m impressed with just how well it’s been able to play discs of varying quality and condition.

My one gripe with the playback capabilities is that, sometimes, the first half-second of audio is cut off when the player first starts playing a CD. This is noticeable for CDs where the audio starts right away in the first second of the first track. I’m sure this will be resolved with a firmware update, but when it happens it is annoying.

Lastly, the DM13 is able to read CD-Rs with the following file formats: FLAC, WAV, WMA, AAC, and MP3. It can also play HDCDs just fine (I have two surprisingly, they weren’t really that common though) and the CD layer of SACDs, which I confirmed with the only SACD I currently own (Nine Inch Nails – The Downward Spiral Deluxe Edition).

FiiO advertises that the DM13 is capable of gapless playback, and it is, but with a caveat. The firmware that my unit shipped with, V20, had issues with most albums and gapless playback, meaning that most of the time it simply did not play gaplessly and would have a noticeable space between tracks (this ruins albums like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon). FiiO resolved the issue with the V22 firmware and now gapless playback works perfectly, but be warned if your unit arrives without the updated firmware.

Other playback features include resuming at the track and time you left off at, even if you powered off the player and removed the disc. As well, there are three repeat options: repeat all (sequential repeat), repeat 1 (single repeat), and repeat random, all of which work as described. There’s also the ability to add tracks as a favorite.

You may have noticed that there is no Stop button on the DM13. I sure did, and it was annoying at first, but in the end, there weren’t really too many situations where I needed to stop playback. FiiO did add a stop function though, which is done by pressing the power button and function button (the first and last buttons) at the same time. This is a reasonable implementation in my opinion.

With the CD player turned on, pressing the power button will display the current status, immediately pressing the power button again will change the audio output mode between USB, Bluetooth, SPIDF, and headphones (3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced outputs).

The last thing I want to mention here is that the DM13 lacks any type of remote or IR support, so there’s no way to control it remotely if you want to set it up in a home theatre environment. IR support would have been nice, but the DM13 is understandably a portable CD player first.

The LCD display will always show the volume level on the very left side, followed by the track number, and finally the current running time of the playing track. You can also adjust the timeout of the LCD screen by pressing the Previous or Next Track button plus the Power button and cycle through the options.

With the DM13 turned on, pressing the Play button will display the current state of the player: Battery level, current audio output, Repeat mode status, ESP status, and Direct Mode status. Pressing stop (first and last buttons pressed at the same time) the LCD will display the total album running time, which is nice to see. There is no support for CD-text, which is fine by me since the majority of CDs do not have this feature anyway.

The FiiO DM13 supports CD ripping and recording in two ways.

The first way is by ripping to a USB flash drive. Plug in a USB-C flash drive or external SSD (I also tried a USB-A to USB-C adapter and it worked fine) formatted in FAT32 to the USB-C port labeled “Power In”. The DM13 must also be powered via the other USB-C port. Once done, holding the Play/Pause button will start ripping to the USB drive. Ripping happens at 1x speed, meaning if the album is 50 minutes long, it will take 50 minutes to rip. Files are created in WAV format in 16-bit/44.1kHz. I confirmed HDCDs are also ripped in this format, not 24-bit. The end result is good, the ripped files sounded exactly the same as rips done with an external CD/DVD drive that I usually use. Note that you cannot listen to the audio while the DM13 is ripping.

The second way is by recording the audio on a PC or Mac. This is done by putting the DM13 in USB mode, plugging a power cable into the “Power In” port, and then plugging a USB cable from your PC or Mac to the “USB REC” port on the player. In my tests, I used my Windows 11 desktop. Once plugged into the PC the DM13 shows up as a USB audio device. When a CD is playing you can then use any type of audio recording application, such as Audacity or Windows Sound Recorder, to record the audio from the USB audio device. The end result here is also good, though probably requires more setup and technical expertise.

In my opinion, while the CD ripping and recording functionality is nice to have, it’s not necessarily needed in a device like this. Instead, I would rather have the CD player show up as an external CD drive to my PC, but this probably would have required extra time and effort to accomplish. If there ends up being a DM15, that is definitely a feature I would like to see with it.

The DM13 has an electronic shock protection mode to ensure to uninterrupted playback when the device is being moved around. This is enabled by simply pressing the switch on the back of the player, even while it is powered on and playing. This is definitely reminiscent of the days when you would be shopping for a portable CD player with various levels of shock protection to weather the bumpy rides on the school bus.

The DM13 provides 60 seconds of shock protection for regular CDs, and 120 seconds for MP3 discs. The documentation makes it seem like the player compresses the audio to achieve this, but I’m pretty sure there is simply a memory buffer being used here. It’s noted that audiophiles should not use the ESP function. For what reason I do not know, as to my ear I could not hear a difference between ESP Off and On.

To be honest, I would be surprised if you really need to have ESP enabled anyway. With ESP turned off I was only able to make the disc skip a couple of times, and that was by somewhat harshly dropping it from a short height down on my desk. Shaking it or walking around with the CD player never once triggered it to skip audio, so in my opinion, you only need to use ESP in extreme circumstances. This could be due to the large amount of room in the CD tray area.

Direct Mode is simply a battery bypass switch. With it turned on the DM13 will be powered by USB through either of the USB-C ports, while at the same time charging the battery if needed. With Direct Mode off, the CD player will use the battery. If USB power is plugged in it will charge the battery in this mode as well.

FiiO states that the battery should last 10 hours on a single charge. I was able to get 9.5 hours consistently, so I’m willing to say that FiiO’s estimate is accurate. Using Bluetooth will drain the battery a bit quicker at just over 8 hours. Your volume level in both modes will be what determines the battery drain though. Being able to listen to 8-10 albums on a single charge feels very reasonable to me.

I have two annoyances regarding this area though. One, the battery level indicator is very vague. When you press the Power button the battery level is displayed, and the levels are from 0-5, which means the following:

• BAT 5 = 90%-100%
• BAT 4 = 80%-90%
• BAT 3 = 60%-80%
• BAT 2 = 40%-60%
• BAT 1 = 20%-40%
• BAT 0 = 0-20%

Second, when the DM13 is plugged in, it will randomly say “Charging”, even with Direct Mode on. This is annoying as it interrupts the display with this message. It would be far better to have an always-present icon of the current battery and charging status, but I guess that is something to be improved in a future version of the player. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, just a little annoying.

The inclusion of Bluetooth is probably the biggest differentiator between the DM13 and other portable CD players, both old and new (even the newly released Moondrop Discdream 2 does not include Bluetooth).

FiiO doesn’t state the Bluetooth chipset they are using in the DM13, but it supports the following codecs: SBC, AAC, aptX, aptX Low Latency, and aptX HD.

When in Bluetooth mode the DM13 will start to pair with any Bluetooth device that is also in pairing mode unless it detects a previously paired device. Once paired it displays the codec being used on the LCD screen. I had no problems with pairing or Bluetooth playback, with one exception. I could not get the player to pair with the iFi GO pod. No amount of factory resetting of either device resolved the issue, so I’m not sure if it’s a problem with the way the GO pod pairs or what, but it was the only Bluetooth device that simply would not work.

My Sony WH-1000XM5 and Sonos Ace headphones worked very well, as did my Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless 4 earbuds. The Bluetooth connection was stable and clear for all of them, even despite needing to use AAC for the XM5. Bluetooth adds so much flexibility to the CD listening experience, it may be THE reason that some people buy this CD player.

Also of note, Bluetooth headphone/earbud controls do work for play/pause, as well as changing tracks.

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The FiiO DM13 uses a Cirrus Logic CS43198 dual DAC and dual amp (SGM8262) setup, that feeds a 3.5mm single-ended connection, and a 4.4mm balanced connection. Both outputs can be used at the same time, which is rather nice since you can have two people listening to the DM13 at the same time without needing to connect to any speakers.

The DM13 outputs a good amount of power and is able to drive most headphones. Using the HIFIMAN Sundara with the balanced connection yielded more than enough volume and power to drive them, same with the Sennheiser HD 660S2. The Audeze LCD-2 on the 3.5mm connection also performed without issue, as did the Beyerdynamic DT 770 Pro 80 ohm.

Jumping over to IEMs, none of the ones I used had any issues with hiss or background noise. The Kiwi Ears Orchestra Lite sounded clean, so it’s safe to say that the DM13 should work very well with most headphones and IEMs out there.

How does the DM13 actually sound though? Well, it sounds like most other DACs that use the CS43198 DAC chip. It leans neutral and has an overall natural, clean, and crisp sound quality. It doesn’t color the audio in any way, and as a result, it’s the perfect choice for a device like this. The headphones you use, as well as the quality of the CD and the recording/master used there, are going to have a greater impact here than anything, which is exactly the way it should be.

I found the Sennheiser HD 620 closed-back headphones to pair very well with the DM13. The HD 620 provides a black background due to its excellent passive noise isolation and allows you to sit down and thoroughly immerse yourself into listening to a CD.

The 3.5mm line-out connection also works well. Using a 3.5mm to optical connection, and then an optical to HDMI adapter, I was able to connect the DM13 to my Sonos Arc for glorious room-filled audio playback. CDs sound wonderful in this way, and I never felt like the player itself was ever holding the audio back.

Overall, the sound quality is as it should be: neutral and fairly transparent, clean, and just wonderfully natural.

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Listening to CDs on the FiiO DM13 brought back a lot of memories from the golden days when CDs were the defacto music medium. It also helped me revisit a lot of albums that I simply haven’t listened to in a while, and allowed me to unwind by putting on a CD and flip through the CD booklet, reading lyrics and other messages or images the artist included in it. That’s something you don’t get in digital music, or even vinyl records for that matter.

I appreciate that FiiO took a chance on something that isn’t necessarily for everyone. Even if they didn’t get it 100% right on the first shot, with the minor firmware-related issues like the audio sometimes cutting out when the disc first starts, or the cumbersome battery info display. At its core, the DM13 plays CDs and it plays them well. The amount of audio connections is just right, Bluetooth performance is excellent, and I’m very impressed with how well the player itself prevents discs from skipping. Not to mention just how well it is able to read even scratched-up and scuffed discs.

At $140 USD (though it was officially stated to be at $179 USD) I think this CD player is well worth the investment at that price, given the sound quality, portability, and number of features. If you’re in the market for a portable CD player, I don’t think you need to look any further than the FiiO DM13.

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I’m not always able to cover all the details of a product, both hardware and software, in our reviews. If you have any specific questions you’d like answered about this product please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly.

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