It’s pretty much common knowledge that we all want to get the best value for our money and what easier route to go is there than taking a look at the cheap alternatives offered on the wayside on our way to our dream setup, audiophile or non-audiophile alike. While there’s indeed a lot of great music players out there from established brands, sprouting music players are hard to ignore especially if they’re named like a license plate.

I’m talking about none other than the JWD JWM-115, your friendly neighbor’s minivan license plate. Although the name sounds funny, this music player if you still didn’t know is indeed similar with a license plate, sometimes worthy of getting a hard look into. The JWM-115 music player was purchased at a discount off AK Audio store and no other monetary factors were involved. You can check out their official AK Audio AliExpress storefront for more of their audiophile product lineup.

Priced at $86 while currently being on sale for $65, the JWM-115 offers DSD256 and lower support in a full touch display with Bi-directional Bluetooth support and the usual 3.5mm audio output yet on a Type-C interface is indeed keeping on the current music player trend. Will it able to flow through the trend or just go down the drain? Let’s check it out.

Specifications and Packaging

JWD JWM-115 Spec sheet:

• SoC (Main processor): RK3308G 4 core
• AMP chip: MAX97220
• Screen: 3 inch full-fit IPS touch screen, 360×640
• Operation: touchpad + capacitive touch buttons
• Dimensions: 94.1 x 51.5 x 11.2 (mm)
• Weight: 110g
• USB: Bi-directional Type-C 2.0, OTG support
• Charging time: <2.5hours (DC5V/2A charger)
• Battery life: >10hours
• Battery: 1700mAh lithium-ion polymer battery
• Storage: micro-SD card (supports up to 128GB)
• BT receiver support: SBC/aptX/AAC
• BT connection support: SBC/aptX

The JWD JWM-115 came in all black cardboard box with silver fonts for all its product information fonts and when opening it, immediately reveals the JWM-115 DAP wrapped in translucent white plastic wrap surrounded by black foam cutouts, underneath it discloses the full accessory set which came in the form of a black Type-C charging cable, product manual in full-on Chinese and a warranty card, no more no less. I would have at least wanted to see an included 1-piece screen protector, so much for the bragging of double-sided glass.

Build Quality

The JWM-115’s main body is made of CNC anodized metal in a brushed surface look that comes out looking like a miniature version of the Hiby R6. Its 2.5D double sided tempered glass feels proportionate when held in hand but also has a distinct and miniscule gap between the glass and the anodized metal body which allows for one to feel like you can rip it off with your fingernail. The singular champagne gold colorway is just about the best contrast with the black 2.5D glass and having no alternate colorway is completely fine with me, allowing to keep the price down by basically utilizing one material throughout the production process. While the overall build quality of the JWM-115 doesn’t reach the feeble and shabby stages, there are indeed trivial drawbacks in it. Mainly the seemingly loose touch buttons, from the power button all the way to the menu button, all suffers from being wiggly at times. It doesn’t come off at all and still works just fine without any hiccups though but the feel that it might come apart is always an unwelcome aura. The rest of the ports though are constructed great, the 3.5mm jack, micro-SD card slot and the Type-C port.

User Interface and Handling

The User Interface of the JWD JWM-15 is certainly one of its weaknesses and absolutely won’t be the reason that you’d be getting this music player. Booting it up takes at around 7-10 seconds and immediately shows the homepage that shows 12 menu icons at 6 per tab page which are easy to navigate and has straightforward flow to it. Display latency has a minor delay but are still able to register almost all touch inputs except when you dive deep into the sub-menus where fonts get smaller along with their cursors and toggle buttons especially if you have stubby fingers, it doesn’t help too that the capacitive touch buttons doesn’t work for navigation controls.

With dimensions mimicking the standard credit card shape, the JWM-115 fits naturally for single hand use and fits on your denim pockets perfectly. The JWM-115’s shape and build may feel great on the hand but the eventual function is to listen to your tunes and things are doing just fine when the display is active and used but things start to go downhill when controlling your music playback when the player is locked and display isn’t used, the pause and play touch buttons doesn’t work at all couple that there’s no dedicated button to skip and go back through your tracks although the volume up and down works. For a dedicated music player, the ability to control your music playback despite not looking on it should have been a given which makes it a total letdown for the JWM-115 in spite of its wonderful and comfortable feel on the hand.

Stability and Connectivity

The JWM-115 only features a 3.5mm output jack with an output power around 15mW at 32 Ohms and it indeed powers most IEMs (Final Audio E5000, Kinera TYR and BGVP DM6) that I tried with it with just the right amount of juice although a glaring lack of headroom was observed on the ATH-AD900x. The Type-C connectivity with regards to file transfer was slow and the usual micro SD card via a card reader was the default choice for transferring tracks to be used on the JWM-115. The WiFi connectivity for file transfer didn’t work with my S10 5G and OnePlus 3T devices confirming the fact that host and slave file transfer options is saved for a JWM-115 to JWM-115 option, would have been great if connection with your regular Android device was supported.

The stability aspect of the JWM-115 in both its input and output Bluetooth functions were great, I tested its BT output function which utilizes SBC/aptX support using the UiiSii TWS60, Kinera YHH623 and Brainwavz BLU-300, all 3 BT earphones were stable and experienced no sudden connection dropouts despite some minor struggles on establishing initial BT connection. Using its BT input function which utilizes SBC/aptX/AAC support using the Samsung S10 5G also gave great results in terms of stability and despite the lack of aptX LL(Low Latency), streaming YouTube videos and watching your occasional dose of movies gave no noticeable delay. Another distinct feature that the JWM-115 has its WiFi song search (holding wherein you could connect to any active WiFi connection and search songs saved on your JWM-115 via voice, not the most useful feature as it didn’t use it much but still worth trying out every once in a while when your too lazy to scroll through your JWM-115.

Sound Quality and Battery Life

There’s no mention as to what DAC chip was used on the JWM-115 except for its AMP chip, the MAX97220 which is used on the FiiO Q1 and the Creative Sound Blaster E3 amplifiers which gives us a glimpse that the hardware used here is much respectable than its marketing team was able to come up with. The inherent sound of the JWM-115 leans on the warmer side with a slight lean on the lower midrange rendering it to sound full when used on the Final Audio E5000, Kinera TYR and BGVP DM6 combo. It pairs best with a balanced sounding IEM(E500) as it doesn’t push the higher frequency to reach a splashy and distorted sound which shows hints of it when paired with a bright sounding IEM(DM6).

The JWM-115’s packs in a 1700mAh lithium-ion polymer battery which gets a full charge at around 4 hours from a full drain when used with a 4A wall charger unit which was surprisingly lackluster at this rate given the lack of quick charge capabilities on the JWM-115, the battery life though takes an uphill tick as it was able to last around 12 hours and 25 minutes at 25/32 volume toggle paired with the Final Audio E500(14Ω Impedance/93dB Sensitivity) and playing 16/44 FLAC files. This battery life gives us a roughly a 3-minute track playback for a minute charge which isn’t the best given that the FiiO M3K doubles this performance.

Conclusion

The JWD JWM-115 offers much of the essentials that a modern music player should have without having to shed the usual music player design. Its battery life isn’t the best but is still respectable given the fact that it can alleviate the burden associated with having your mobile phone as a music player. This same aspect is also the same characteristic coupled with the inability to control music playback when the display is not active which makes the JWM-115 a toss up to being a total recommendation if you still plan to really use your mobile phone most of the time as a music player as the sound offered by the JWM-115 isn’t far off from most recent mobile phone releases. Despite all this, the price tag that the JWM-115 carries still makes it worth a consideration as it doesn’t inherently have major setbacks.

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