As the happy owner of a NW-Z507 (and matching Sony 1000XM4 earbuds and a more traditional WH-XB900N over-the-ear headset), the Sony Walkman lineup is worth every single dollar!
It's helped me rediscover some of my classics!
The 507 is Android, which was both a pro (more apps) and con (battery life) especially since the Sony default player is a bit special. I didn't need Android as I don't use streaming, but I wanted USB-C, and that excluded previous models like the A55.
The battery life is less of a problem than I thought it would be, as my earbuds are drained first.
However, I'm still not a fan of the Sony music player. If you want to try Sony newest Android lineup, I recommend installing the foobar music player.
I'd love to A-B these to my trusty old FiiO X5 with Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising). Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I grew up on vinyl via my (crazy/rich) older brother's Class A/B stereo. I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
> Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising).
I prefer the 900N outside, and the 1000XM inside.
To exercise with some music, I'm waiting for good neckband headphones with active audio cancellation: ideally something like the Anker Soundcore Life U2 - same form factor and USB-C plug, but with LDAC, AptX HD and a quality at least on par with the Shure AONIC.
Yes I'm super picky :)
> Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
Oh so much this!! I'm hearing instruments that I hadn't noticed before! The first week, I thought it was in my head, because some of the tracks I've been listening to for years started sounding different!!
But no, the Sony is that good. Again, it's worth every dollar.
> I'm spoiled
Now I'm spoiled too :) I just can't forget how much better it made my favorite tracks!
TBH, the Sony has been my best purchase of these last few years: it has even rekindled my interest in music.
Right now I'm exploring "pop urbaine", a very interesting genre that I didn't even know existed.
One thing no "new" mp3 player has done correctly is audio books. None of them do bookmarking as well as rockbox. Also, new mp3 players usually have terrible battery life. Because of these reasons, I bought myself about 7 sandisk sansa players on ebay and have gotten very good at fixing their shitty headphone jack problem.
With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list of recent bookmarks per file.
Can this sony do any of that? Hardware music player have gone down hill.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a successful open hardware project for a portable music player. Rockbox, a low power SoC, some decent DAC, a basic display - epaper would be kind of neat - and preferably a standard battery - something like the Nokia BL-5C.
I don’t find it surprising. It’s a solved problem. Every phone has a music player built-in, you can even choose which one to use from hundreds of options. Offline, streaming, self-hosted cloud, the options are nearly infinite.
Even if you don’t love the lack of headphone jack in the typical phone [1], the solution is an adapter that costs less than $10. What open hardware project can compete with that?
[1] Non-audiophiles are perfectly happy with AAC/AptX codecs over Bluetooth, the bottleneck is still the quality of your headphones, IMO, and the convenience of never tangling a cable greatly outweighs missing out on the audiophile ghost whispering that they supposedly hear
I mean, I don't disagree with your main point, but I hundred percent disagree with the notion audiophiles are the ones missing the 3.5mm jack. I miss it awfully and it's due to sheer convenience. Every one of my headphones used to work seemlessly with every one of my devices. I had cheap headphones (and later headsets) in each car, at the office, in the backpack, at home, and nice headphones at home, and they each and all worked with every phone and device immediatelly and without hassle or issues. They never ran out of battery, never disconnected, never had any lag, never garbled music, and were never obsoleted due to new codec or BT version or incompatibility or the eventual death of lithium ion. And they never wanted me to pull my little remaining hair if I dared to switch headphone or device.
Labeling those who vehemently miss 3.5mm as audiophiles is a straw man or phenomenal proportions.
Yup. I am definitely wouldnt call myself an audiophile, but I like my over ear headphones. I switch them easily between my desktop, my laptop, and my cell phone. They never die. Then I take my phone to my ten year old car and plug an aux cable in (it has Bluetooth but it is garbage - slow to connect, bad quality for music (regular skipping etc). Then when I travel to family's houses and want to play something over their stereo with an aux input, I can easily.
There is also value of 3.5mm input on the speaker - it reduces battery drain a lot (useful when camping for example, mine lasted longer almost 50%). All three BT speakers I was able to find in my flat (different brands) have the line-in connector. Checked just now because I was curious.
If you had nice headphones they probably didn’t work perfectly with everything, since most nice ones need a headphone amp to sound like they’re supposed to. The analog interface also means inconsistent volume, and using them on a walk means cable microphonics.
There are plenty of nice headphones with low impedance among grado, sennheiser, beyerdynamic etc, you kinda have to go out of your way to choose a high impedance “home stereo” style ‘phone
Wait, aren't Stax the electrostatic high-voltage headphones? I think at that point, "Convenience" is deeply crossed out as a selection criteria, and a portable phone while jogging is not a likely scenario :).
They actually made IEMs once. Beyond the technology being hard to manufacture, Stax's products are mainly just inaccessible because they have the traditional Japanese business approach of being run by 800 year olds who are actively offended by the idea that anyone they don't know might want one of their products.
"Nice headphones" is of course relative. I have two sets of Sennheiaer hd380. They plugged into anything and everything and sounded nice to my ears. They are super comfy. They still plug into my computer, synthesizer, and most of my stuff - but not of course my wife's iPhone.
(My old galaxy s2 had microsd, replaceable battery, grippy exterior,and of course 3.5 mm jack while being smaller in every dimension so I am skeptical as to some of the arguments other than "apple did it so entire industry will copy it")
As indicated above - I'm not am audiophile but I enjoy listening to music, and miss the easy convenience of 3.5mm jack on my phone along with everything else. A headphone amp would completely counter act the convenience and practicality.
It was perfect for the time. It's definitely lacking in features today, which is by definition true of any phone from that era.
I still have them both with me and in active use - mostly as remote controls, kids games, etc.
Perhaps more pertinently, my daily driver is a Galaxy Note 8, which also has a 3.5mm jack and MicroSD card. There's really nothing that my 4-generations newer, work-mandated iPhone has, in terms of functionality and definitely battery life, that Note 8 does not. iPhones are about sexy impracticality, and that's clearly where market has gone (Unlike S2 & S5, Note 8 also cannot be held without a case) - I'm just a old grouch who misses the olden days :).
The pre-Android Sony Walkmans (like the NW-A55 mentioned above) have decent battery life. I typically get around 30 hours from my SONY NW-A45. In a world where many modern “audiophile” players only get 8-10 hours of playback, that’s not bad.
However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).
I have a Rockboxed Sansa Clip+. I like that I can set it to turn off automatically, so I can fall asleep listening and not have it play all night. I also like that it will pick up right where I left off the last time. That's nice for podcasts and books. I suppose that might be what you meant by bookmarking.
You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stressing the jack.
I had one for a week and returned it. IIRC there was no sleep/standby feature. You either lock it like an iphone screen or turn it off. But it starts pretty quickly when you turn it off, so that's not the problem. For me it was just too slow and instable. There is a github repo with all the issues (https://github.com/vext01/hiby-issues) - check that before you buy one.
Why are yours dying so fast? (Alternatively, why do mine hold up so well?)
I have had two Clip+ in the last 15 years. I retired the first one because I broke the clip off; it still works otherwise. I was using them about 2 hours a day until the pandemic.
I have had several clip+ses over the year, and the one thing that died every time was the onboard flash (which prevents the player from booting at all). I resurrected my last one where it was only corrupted and not dead, but I did not have other issues otherwise.
Now I am using an hiby R3, which is quite clunkier, but allows me to choose between microsd storage and streaming from the phone in high quality, while also having 2.5mm balanced IEMs (kind of a gimmick, but I like their sound a lot).
edit: and of course being able to finally ditch USB-mini is great.
For anyone affected by this, a simple trick to reviving a Sansa Clip+ that won't turn on is to hold the power and home button simultaneously for about 20-30 seconds. Let go and press the power button and it might turn on.
I'm not sure what causes these players to become unresponsive. It's happened to me when it tries to play an unusual file or after I've transferred music to the device and left it plugged into the computer for a while.
They are still my favorite standalone portable mp3 player, even with the stock firmware.
One ended up on a trip through the washing machine and didn't survive. Another's jack broke (common problem that I didn't back then know how to prevent), and I broke it even more when being an idiot in trying to fix it. The last wore out its internal flash (I think).
Because Spotify et al doesn't give you a big directory full of MP3s. On top of that, the physical interface and features of a small dedicated player is a better user experience.
What’s better about a small dedicated player compared to using an offline media jukebox app?
Smartphones can play offline media. They can play media hosted on a private server. Nobody’s forcing any smartphone user to use Spotify in particular. There’s always alternatives like VLC and countless others that offer that same functionality.
To me, a dedicated player is redundant hardware with less processing power and refinement than a typical smartphone.
Even Apple, king of the locked down proprietary experience, has a Music app with the option to completely disable and hide their streaming service from even being visible. You can sync music via a USB cable or WiFi from local files just like it was an original iPod.
> What’s better about a small dedicated player compared to using an offline media jukebox app?
Sometimes offline requires more effort. I would rather my kid have a dedicated MP3 player that does just that instead of a phone that requires locking down with too many points of breach. Way more cheaper to replace too compared to a lost/damaged smartphone.
Well first of all I hate touchscreens and wish they would die in a fire. Every smartphone I've had has been too big for me to comfortably use with one hand, compared to older dumbphones which were very easy to use. Even if you find a small smartphone, the touchscreen then gets cramped. A small digital screen and thoughtfully placed physical buttons creates an interface that I can navigate without ever taking it out of my pocket. It also takes up less space, which opens up new possibilities for places to put it or when/where to take it. When you have a small device with physical buttons, you can just do more with it, easier, faster, more reliably.
The other thing is, most smartphones today are insanely over-complicated and not reliable at all. They consume an insane amount of system resources, their battery life is piss-poor, they're constantly being updated which leads to more instability. And new devices aren't necessarily backwards compatible with old apps, meaning you might end up with a phone just for music anyway, or end up losing a useful app. A dedicated device with a simpler RTOS can actually function faster, better, more reliably, for longer.
And to top it all off, the software of a Sony Walkman is usually top-notch. Good EQ presets, an interface designed to make it easy to navigate, with all the player options you want, with UX front and center. Quality control is high because you have to assume the user will never update the firmware.
And having a bunch of MP3s by default is just the simplest thing you can do. Usually the software auto-indexes and sorts and creates playlists etc by the ID3 tags, but if not, you can organize them manually into folders and manual playlists. You have pretty much total control over the music selection, experience, quality.
I don't have to worry about my music being removed because the licensing changed at the streaming provider. I tried various streaming services and all of them removed music from me at some point. This isn't something that's particularly negotiable for me.
I can trivially add songs that aren't on a streaming service using youtube-dl or similar.
I can change songs by pressing a physical button on the side of the player, meaning it doesn't have to leave my pocket and I don't have to look at it. This is particularly useful while exercising.
You can do all of this with a smartphone, though. There are plenty of offline music apps for smartphones. There are plenty of phones (and headphones) with physical buttons to control music.
My main criticism is that this is all redundant hardware with basically no unique capabilities.
Even if the DAC is extra special, that’s something you can get on a phone via USB.
In my opinion, the iOS experience for playing offline music is going downhill, and has been since the iPhone 3GS era.
It gets more and more difficult to have a UI dedicated to offline music - you can disable streaming, but you can't disable the 'Radio' section of the Music app for example.
Similarly, the user experience has got quite a bit worse for navigating your catalogue: 10 years or so ago, you used to be able to click the Name of the Artist or Album that was playing, and it would jump to either the artist or the album respectively: these days, on iOS 15, doing that does nothing other than jump back to the currently playing song list (so current album normally), neither does hold-and-press. I have to navigate with the back button, or go back through library, and find the artist each time, or use search.
There are third part dedicated apps and I've tried some of them (and bought Ecoute and VOX), but they're not perfect either.
Smartphones are also generally a lot larger, so they don't fit in my pocket very well while cycling or running.
I need my smartphone to do a whole bunch of things outside playing music, and restricting myself to specific models with physical audio control buttons and small screens makes the market a lot smaller and would probably leave me with a poorer phone than picking one without needing to think about its ability to play music while exercising. I did this for my previous phone and the result wasn't very pleasant, so went with the separate players this time around.
Different headphones might be an option, but again a lot of the better phones are ditching headphone jacks, so it would be restricting my phone options.
you can still load songs directly. I use the controls on my earbuds to switch songs. Not as fine a degree of control but most of the time I just need to skip anyway.
I have both a Walkman (for music) and an upgraded/rebuilt iPod (for audiobooks) and prefer them for a few reasons:
- They don’t use any mobile data, and work when in a mobile-phone black spot (e.g. the national parks I go to most weekends). This is the main one.
- I can store all my music on there, without needing to use any storage space on my phone.
- They last forever with some basic maintenance. My iPod was made in 2006. I’ve upgraded the battery and replaced the HDD with an SD-card, but otherwise it just keeps on going.
- I can switch EQ profiles on my Walkman super-easily to suit different music or headphones. No navigating menus, it’s done in under a second.
- Tactile controls and voiced menus on my Rockboxed iPod. I can use the device entirely without looking at the screen. Handy when driving, but also useful when jogging or cycling, any other time you’d rather not stare at a screen instead of being aware of your environment.
- I can load them up with the exact pressing of music I want to listen to. For many old albums, which have gone though a dozen re-releases and remasters, this makes a difference. In fact, for some albums I have several different releases on my player, all with their distinct character, pros and cons.
- Brilliant bookmarking in Rockbox for audiobooks. Super customisable. And dedicated players never do a software update and lose your state. It’s always ready to go, precisely where I left it.
- Car mode. Brilliant for cars like my weekender that predate proper phone connectivity. Rockbox will automatically pause your audiobook when you turn off the ignition and start again when you’re back.
- Ability to enable dynamic range compression to combat road noise. All in a few button presses, without looking at the screen.
Are they for everyone? Of course not. But all of the above things matter to me personally.
I’ve started using my old iPod video again, and enjoying it for music, but curious on your use case for it as deviated audiobooks. How did you rebuild it specifically for audiobooks? Just toss RockBox on it?
I think you're selling me on upgrading my 4th gen iPod. I didn't realize you can swap out the HDD for a SD card. It looks pretty easy too! Also all this talk about Rockbox makes me want to try it.
From a usability perspective Spotify is doing stuff like pushing podcasts all over its interface, and sometimes the UI just completely freezes up.
There’s theoretical stuff about losing access to music but there’s the entirely practical issues that come from playing music off of a remote server that has to track plays etc vs stuff on disk and a software stack that doesn’t have to be concerned about new features or some upselling to meet KPIs.
And of course a dedicated player is just a player, so you’re gonna be able to quickly open and do stuff. The problem with Omnidevices is you gotta first navigate to the single purpose thing
This has happened to me noticeably a bunch of times. It happened on Spotify, which I’ve since switched away from, but it happens on Tidal too (which I use now). I’m not sure if Spotify still has this feature, but Tidal will show me a song “grayed out” if it was on a playlist but it’s unavailable now. It isn’t often, but sometimes songs/albums that I really like just… go away. You wouldn’t always notice, but it is definitely a very real issue!
Because there's a lot of niche, obscure music missing from streaming services. People who are into music care about those gaps in the catalogue and they want to own their collection without fear of loosing access to their content due to changing rights, which might happen any day.
I know. My whole collection lives in Apple's music.app - I jsut don't want to rely on their (or anyone else's) streaming service. I use Spotify merely to preview releases I consider buying.
The author could have probably shed a tad more light on why they feel music apps (spotify et al) are bad. I agree with them though - these apps are atrocious to use, and seem to be continually getting worse. Some of my ongoing complaints about spotify are the following:
* Offline mode still doesn't work properly, after literally years of development. If you lose connection while streaming and want to switch to your 'downloaded albums'? Nope, the app will hang on a blank screen or crash. As londoner, this means spotify basically doesn't work on the tube at all - again, _even in offline-mode_.
* App will generally blank screen, hang, or crash semi-regularly for no apparent reason at least a couple times a day.
* Audio quality is awful. The default is 96kbps, which I believe even the most untrained listening can hear the crumminess of.
* Tons of missing music, even from mainstream artists.
* UI makes it difficult to navigate playlists <-> artist <-> song <-> album, traversing the hierarchy of music associations
* UI prioritises pushing podcast & other unwanted commercial content at you, make it difficult to find what you want and navigate the library
Then you've got the scumminess of the company itself that you alluded to (not paying artists, toxic corporate politics, etc).
>> But the audio quality is a noticeable upgrade from my iPhone 8
Is this still true with latest iPhone? I would expect that iPhone hardware is not a limiting factor for audio quality (assuming a wired adaptor for HiFi headphones)
Yeah, it's really hard to believe that... compute power is the limiting factor on audio? In 2022? On a $1k piece of hardware? Over Bluetooth, in both cases?
No idea, but it doesn’t surprise me that a dedicated audio player could theoretically do a lot better. Just as one would generally expect a DSLR to beat the iPhone for picture quality.
Well it depends on the material really. You can take a good photo on a phone and a crappy one on a DSLR. You can listen to crap music on a dedicated audio player too…
While I can't speak to either the iPhone or the Walkman, the quality of the digital-to-analog converter is significantly more important than raw horsepower or other capabilities. Where they're analog devices, there's much less to be said about the "it's just zeroes and ones" argument.
Some older devices I've owned had good-quality DACs - a Palm Treo being the best. My current ThinkPad has a downright awful DAC, to the point where music sounds _better_ over my Bluetooth headphones (Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT) than when plugged straight in. The quality issues are even more egregious for the cheap dock I use for my work MacBook Pro, which puts out so much electrical noise over the headphone jack as to be annoying even in in Zoom calls.
One of my high school teachers soldered some kind of extension cord onto the pins at the bottom of his iPod because that signal bypasses the crappy amp on the device.
The latest iPhone doesn't have a DAC in it for headphones. The little 3.5mm-to-lightning dongle is active -- it contains a tiny DAC/amp powered by the lightning port.
Is the tiny lightning dongle a good DAC? The answer is largely "it's fine". Anyone who isn't on the cork-sniffing side of audiophile trends will find it acceptable, assuming the amp is capable of driving the load of whatever headphones you're plugging into it.
My experience was (and one of the reasons I miss the headphone jack is) that the dongle quality + Apple ear buds wasn't as good as the DAC the older iPhones had.
I don't want to deny that, when picking up the two & due to some trickery of your own brain, you prefer the iPhone 8, but I do doubt is that it is because of a measurable difference in audio quality.
Perhaps, but I was comparing Apple ear buds with the 3.5mm jack vs lightning ones. Presumably the drivers and whatnot would be similar. In general I don't think audio quality has ever been particularly important to Apple. The iPhone (and all smartphones really) is a jack of all trades gizmo not a device for high quality audio playback.
I remember when I had a first gen iPhone and the call quality was atrocious with AT&T compared to my RAZR on Verizon. You get used to it over time but back to back it was pretty dramatic.
"Next, you need a decent DAC such as the Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt, Cyrus soundKey or Chord Mojo 2 and a good pair of headphones, such as the Grado SR325x, Shure Aonic 3 or Austrian Audio Hi-X55.
This is just a starting point, of course. Don’t be afraid to build up to a more revealing system. You could combine the Chord Hugo 2 DAC with a pair of Beyerdynamic T1 (3rd Generation) headphones for a more premium set-up. That might be a touch overkill and punishingly transparent for an iPhone, but these are hi-res files, after all."
Oh I don't particularly care about audio quality from the iPhone, most of the time I'm using it in a noisy environment. I've a decent pair of proper headphones but there's no way I'd wear them in public.
More to the point I don't want dongles for my phone either. These are all solutions for Apple cheapening the product.
I’ve got a decent quality pro audio interface and monitor headphones. I’ve also got airpod pros. The AirPods sound much much better and I prefer listening to anything with them.
I really doubt that the Walkman's audio quality is "better" than the iPhone 8's in any objective sense.
> I’m not an audiophile, and I’m sure said people would blanch if they read about the files I play. But the audio quality is a noticeable upgrade from my iPhone 8. It sounds so much clearer, especially in the midrange. Its EQ settings also add extra sparkle and pop, for want of better words! It’s the biggest uplift in sound I’ve experienced since I bought AKG monitors for home.
According to gsmarena measurements, the output of the iPhone 8 is extremely accurate across the entire spectrum[1]. Sampling a few gsmarena reviews, this is also true for a typical modern Samsung or Xiaomi phone, or even an ancient iPhone 4s.
I believe accurate audio quality is indeed a solved problem, and what the author's describe as an upgrade in quality is just more pleasantly tuned (though distorted) EQ settings (c.f. the "warm" sound of vinyl vs accurate redbook CD-audio).
Probably over a decade ago my wife bought me a Sony Walkman MP3 player for Christmas, and even though I ended up going with something that was Audible.com friendly, I was so impressed with the earbuds' quality I've sourced them a couple of times so I have a lifetime supply at this point. (If interested, I think the model number was MDR-EX082)
I got a Fiio M7 for Christmas or my birthday a year ago. It's amazing how awesome it is to have a device that's dedicated to music and does a great job at it. There are side loadable apps like Musicolet that also do a great job of providing all the music management you could want.
I too assumed that dedicated MP3 players were relegated to very low-budget devices, and I didn't realize that Sony was still producing the Walkman line. I decided to take a look at their line up to what was happening in the space - https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
Boy... what a massive range of prices. There's a touchscreen-less device for $75, one resembling the one described by the author at $350, an $850 model with different chassis and higher output but nothing else I can immediately see, and then models jumping up to $1100, $1400, $3200 (!), and even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper. I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
Yes..."Sony" is probably better seen as a group, with a lot of different entities doing their thing almost independently (not even talking about their entertainment and financing branch, really just the main bloc)
For instance Sony's audio branch is probably completely separate from the camera branch, which is separate from the TV branch, which doesn't talk to the EV car branch. I don't know if financially they are separate companies, but from what I got they are clearly cut divisions.
I imagine them as an archipelago of products and services, all under a common flag, but only talking to each others by delegations.
For instance Sony has a NFC venture that is really good with encryption and hardware data transfers, it's even integrated in their VAIO computer line. Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
> For instance Sony has a NFC venture that is really good with encryption and hardware data transfers, it's even integrated in their VAIO computer line.
They also support Felica (NFC-F) on most of their hardware.
> Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
The only NFC part in the walkman is pairing headphones by touching them - something I actually enjoyed!
Now I wish music could be transferred in the same way!
They have several devices, old and new, some with an in-house UI on Linux and others atop Android, at vastly different prices. So this comment isn't very clear or helpful.
> I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
I was also skeptical, but after hearing the difference, I'm not coming back. I'm rediscovering my favorite tracks! I'm hearing instruments in the background that I couldn't hear before!!
> even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper
TBH I don't care much about gold, but 40h battery life? That speaks to me. And if there's as much of an audible difference as I got from my middle range NW-Z507, I'll be happy to spend $3600 on an item that brings me happiness every single day.
> You’ll be happy to hear that you also get that on the cheap low-end devices!
It won't matter much if their quality is so poor I don't want to bother listening, or if the interface doesn't provide hardware buttons meaning I won't be able to skip tracks in my car.
One thing to factor in is the longevity of these devices, they aren’t an 18month affair like the typical smartphone. Battery aside, I have an original Zune that boots right up, and an unmodified iPod Mini with 4GB of spinning metal that doesn’t skip a beat, that’s about 17 or 18 years gone by, people also offer them on eBay spec’d out with upgraded battery, memory, and DACs
Got a Fiio. Never trust Sony anymore after the forced Atrac-nonsense in almost every device: it would only play MP3 after being converted to an Atrac-file. After they blocked my Sony PSN account it is Never again Sony.
Curiosity question: has anyone done any work on reverse-engineering the Sony Mega Bass feature they used to have on old analog players (and ported to some early MP3 ones)? It sounded so much deeper than any phone/sound card would give. I'm wondering if it's some purely analog schenanigans (some tricky extra capacitors?) or if it can be replicated in pure software.
> The NW-A55 is part of Sony’s budget digital audio player lineup. ... It worked out about AU $300 including shipping, not bad considering how expensive iPods and cassette Walkmans used to be.
We must have very different definitions of "budget" because 200 EUR for MP3 player is nowhere close to budget line in times when you can buy decent budget phones for that money or how much I spent for great cassette Panasonic walkman. He is also comparing prices of technology at peak with price of technology pretty much nobody buys anymore and they should be giving pretty much for free.
Btw 16GB model having 12.26GB available capacity I'd expect from some Android phone and not dumb MP3 player.
If sound quality + local music + non-android is the goal there are plenty of lossless audiophile dedicated devices with DACs and amps built in on Amazon, with some nice designs:
I owned a FiiO many years ago, took it travelling, drowned it multiple times and it died underwater, still playing music on a boat after like 6 years of constant use and abuse. It's the best device I ever owned.
Honestly, I have trouble finding out if these devices even do playlists, and if so, what format?
I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I have some "musts," I probably don't even know the right questions to ask, and I guess forums for this kind of thing stopped existing.
Music is very important to me. I'm considering the WM1ZM2, but I've seen a lot of great reviews about the FiiO and Surfans - but the F20 doesn't have Bluetooth (ok if LDAC and AptXhd are supported) and the F35 doesn't have USB-C.
The M11 plus has both BT+ USB-C, along with hardware buttons. If it can give me better audio and battery life than the WM1ZM2, I'm interested!
This used to be available in the United States for purchase. I have one, and bought it in 2020 from Best Buy for $170. [0] Good to know it's still available in Japan, but it's a shame it doesn't seem to be in stock in the US anymore since it's a fantastic player. It's free from all the smartphone bloat and runs a slick interface on vanilla linux (and works just fine with linux as USB mass storage device, as well as an FM radio receiver, and a bluetooth client/host).
That there is no wifi in my mind is a feature rather than a bug.
I also like to think that model name is an homage to the hip hop group, N.W.A. :-P
I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become. It’s also nice having a dedicated player that isn’t inundated with notifications and other modern distractions.
Until you see something done well, we get seduced by "features" and loose track of how nice a really well design thing can be. (Got to hand it to old Apple, they did know design.)
I use a dedicated voice recorder to think while I walk. It has made a world of difference in my thinking. And no, a phone with an app is not the same. A button you can press anytime that just records is a godsent. No notifications, no chats, no Trillion dollar companies giving you dopamine shots.
Your attention is too valuable. We are squandering it on devices that are designed so you can't think clearly.
This is so true. I avoid using my phone other than to receive phone calls and sometimes text people. I find most of the dedicated devices like voice recorders, GPS, flashlight has a far more intuitive, faster and more functional interface than the apps that mimic them on a phone.
Also, my GPS can (and has) jumped out of my backpack and dropped over 100ft and worked (and still works) just fine. Not sure I would like to bet my life hoping the same outcome with my phone while I am in the middle of nowhere.
It's crazy that we have come there, but reading this I am actually entertaining buying one.
It is shocking how bad the experience of listening to my own music has become on iphones. Dongles (different for ipads and iphone of course), itunes for windows is barely usable, there is a bug they never fixed where the music player on iOS randomly mismatch the album artwork, and there are so many conflicting gestures that I always end up messing what I am trying to do. And like a year ago an OS update auto-decreases the volume if it deems I am listening too loud. Android isn't an option for me because Google.
But it's a pain to have to carry two devices, manage two batteries.
I religiously use Spotify for music on my iPhone. Are you against the subscription payment model, or are you considering this device because it’s better than Spotify on an iPhone? If it is better, how so? Genuinely curious if there are better music options than my current “setup”.
Subscription model doesn't work for the stuff I listen to. I want specific interpretations of specific operas, I want playlists by composer (no two album uses the same spelling for a classical music composer). I want playlists that skip the recitatives, etc.
And I already own the music, legally purchased on itunes and amazon. Why would I rent it?
While Spotify covers most popular stuff there's a huge amount of music that isn't available on any streaming service. Plus, your content might disappear any day.
I use Spotify for previewing, exploring and making some buying decisions but my actual collection is mine. It's lossless, DRM-free and I plan to have it for ages to come.
This is it for me, I used Apple Music for a few years and eventually I noticed that some of my playlists would have tracks missing - sometimes a listing would be ghosted, sometimes it would straight up vanish. I called time, brought a A50 and haven't looked back: https://chanc.ee/posts/20200830-abandon-stream.html
Granted my music tastes are esoteric but silently modifying my playlists felt grievous. Now I make sure that subscription money goes on supporting artists directly.
But the nice thing about apple music is that you can add any song to it on your PC and it syncs it to all your devices. So if you have an esoteric taste, you can mix it in with the streaming service.
Why is that? The thing that terrifies me with less known brands is the quality of the DAC. I had so many shitty mp3 players before settling on ipods in 2003. Even today most laptops motherboard DAC are useless.
M0 is much lighter and cheaper and uses USB-C instead of a proprietary cable. The feature set is roughly similar (audio formats, USB audio, BT source/sink, etc.). It doesn't offer any media sync software, though. DAC should be good ("ESS Sabre ES9218P") but honestly I can't tell the difference between Apple's own 3.5mm-Lightning dongles and fancy audio equipment. At least it's not obviously noisy.
P.S. These players don't have very powerful CPUs, obviously, and this makes me wonder whether they can handle more complex audio compression formats (such as AAC encoding for Bluetooth) without cheating and using sub-optimal encoding settings.
You might already be aware but there is a range of alternative music players on iOS that focus on listening to a local music library. Doesn't help with dongles - but may fix your software issues.
For me the killer feature of the desktop music.app is still the option to transcode to a lower bitrate during sync. My lossless music library spans close to 2 TB (and growing) these days. SD cards are very expensive at that kidn of storage - so in contrast to the article sd cards certainly don't provide limitless space.
Anyway. To meet mobile storage requirements I need to transcode it to 256 kbps AAC and I don't want to handle this manually or manage a second lossy library. music.app / iTunes easily does this on the fly during sync.
I'm sure other software / hardare players can do that too - but if it's the same process why would I carry an additional device around? The iPhone is just very convenient for that purpose. Otherwise I really like Sony's Walkman range.
It's difficult to disentangle this from the switch to streaming and regarding the latter it is very much unclear whether this was a consumer preference or just something that one-sidedly benefitted an oligopolistic music industry and consumers just had to live with it. Even if a preference for streaming apps reflects an uncoerced choice that a majority of consumers made back then or would make today, it's still a hallmark of a well-functioning market and a free society if the needs/preferences of the minority don't go entirely unserved by the market.
You know what was an oligopoly? The original music services we used in the early aughts. The *vast majority* of music being bought and downloaded in the wild west days of PMP's was from iTunes. And I think you would be surprised to see that Amazon and iTunes account for a significant amount of music sales still to this day
It's plain to see that the needs and preferences of minority users are being served too. This NW-A55 device obviously has a following. Sony pumps out a PMP every so often. Music nerds are probably the #1 target for weird enthusiast gear outside of gaming/pop-culture knickknacks.
We seem to be in perfect agreement then. It's a good thing that these devices are still getting made. Your initial comment made it sound like you took a different view, but maybe I misunderstood.
But it's also frustrating when one track in the middle of an album disappears, or when a few tracks from an old playlist are suddenly greyed out for some licensing reason.
For these reasons I started buying actual records of my favorite albums a few years ago. I realized I had spent X amount on 10 years of Google Music (now youtube music) and had nothing to show for it. In fact, during that time tracks had disappeared from my playlists.
So I felt more like a conservator than a music lover buying up old 90s albums.
> As a society we already processed and answered this question in the late 00's
Yes, but I think this is being revisited. Vinyl continues to grow for example. Some of us are going away from single devices which can do everything, but can also control and spy on you for everything.
With single devices it feels like you're the curator of a collection just for you. With Spotify it feels like you're just an ear that's being leased.
Even if you don't like physical media, it's nice to have a collection that you can depend on. You never know when Spotify will take stuff away from you, or just won't add more obscure stuff. (Although, given how left wing Spotify is, I was quite surprised that you can find Werwolf by Absurd. I'm not sure how long that will last.)
> ...you can pocket the player and use its physical side controls for play/pause, stop, back, forward, and hold...
Many Bluetooth headphones have physical controls for that. E.g. my Marshall headphones have a nifty little "joystick": up/down for volume, left/right for skip, press for pause/accept call, long press to turn on/off. Elegant, minimalistic, easy to remember.
> It’s also nice having a dedicated player that isn’t inundated with notifications and other modern distractions. Separating out ebooks to a dedicated tablet worked the same wonders for my anxiety.
YMMV - I for one would be ridden by the anxiety of missing an important call on my phone while listening to a dedicated music player...
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 124 ms ] threadIt's helped me rediscover some of my classics!
The 507 is Android, which was both a pro (more apps) and con (battery life) especially since the Sony default player is a bit special. I didn't need Android as I don't use streaming, but I wanted USB-C, and that excluded previous models like the A55.
The battery life is less of a problem than I thought it would be, as my earbuds are drained first.
However, I'm still not a fan of the Sony music player. If you want to try Sony newest Android lineup, I recommend installing the foobar music player.
If you use wired headsets and the limited battery life is a problem for you, check the 1ZM2: https://musicphotolife.com/2022/05/sony-wm1zm2-review-digita...
A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I grew up on vinyl via my (crazy/rich) older brother's Class A/B stereo. I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
I prefer the 900N outside, and the 1000XM inside.
To exercise with some music, I'm waiting for good neckband headphones with active audio cancellation: ideally something like the Anker Soundcore Life U2 - same form factor and USB-C plug, but with LDAC, AptX HD and a quality at least on par with the Shure AONIC.
Yes I'm super picky :)
> Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine.
Oh so much this!! I'm hearing instruments that I hadn't noticed before! The first week, I thought it was in my head, because some of the tracks I've been listening to for years started sounding different!!
But no, the Sony is that good. Again, it's worth every dollar.
> I'm spoiled
Now I'm spoiled too :) I just can't forget how much better it made my favorite tracks!
TBH, the Sony has been my best purchase of these last few years: it has even rekindled my interest in music.
Right now I'm exploring "pop urbaine", a very interesting genre that I didn't even know existed.
My favorite tracks are inbetween EDM and Raeggeton, the best example being "On fleek" by Eva - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_eEW2Ioe-o (starts at 0:30)
I would never have expected I'd take a liking to french music, but here I'm! Thank you Sony!!
> A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded.
This too!
I only use FLAC ripped from known-good sources like DDD audio CDs, but after reading a few things like https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/51326/spotting-a-f... and https://musicfans.stackexchange.com/questions/12545/original... I've been thinking about developing a "scoring" app that would basically do a spectrogram and look for suspicious banding to rate my CDs on a 0-10 scale.
> For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 locks me in, until I can find a week or two to re-rip to a more modern lossless format.
I recently re-ripped using a slot-in Apple Superdrive with Windows Media Player Classic running on Windows 11 set to auto-rip into FLAC.
I just worked as usual and every now and then swapped the CDs from 2 huge piles on the side of my desk.
> I'm spoiled, and feel sorry for the people today that think MP3-120 is "good enough".
Same lol
See https://diyaudiostore.com/
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/
for details. Hobby-ist driven, fantastic stuff.
I use it on my fiio, phone, tablet, usb dac, etc.
B. I resent that this is so expensive. I'm not saying you shouldn't pay it, but it feels too expensive by half.
With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list of recent bookmarks per file.
Can this sony do any of that? Hardware music player have gone down hill.
Even if you don’t love the lack of headphone jack in the typical phone [1], the solution is an adapter that costs less than $10. What open hardware project can compete with that?
[1] Non-audiophiles are perfectly happy with AAC/AptX codecs over Bluetooth, the bottleneck is still the quality of your headphones, IMO, and the convenience of never tangling a cable greatly outweighs missing out on the audiophile ghost whispering that they supposedly hear
Labeling those who vehemently miss 3.5mm as audiophiles is a straw man or phenomenal proportions.
I like aux because it's easy. It just works.
> It has NFC for pairing with wireless headphones, but it also has a headphone jack so you can choose. Shock of horrors
Although the best one I own is a Stax which needs an entire speaker amp.
https://www.headfonia.com/baby-stax/
(My old galaxy s2 had microsd, replaceable battery, grippy exterior,and of course 3.5 mm jack while being smaller in every dimension so I am skeptical as to some of the arguments other than "apple did it so entire industry will copy it")
As indicated above - I'm not am audiophile but I enjoy listening to music, and miss the easy convenience of 3.5mm jack on my phone along with everything else. A headphone amp would completely counter act the convenience and practicality.
I still have them both with me and in active use - mostly as remote controls, kids games, etc.
Perhaps more pertinently, my daily driver is a Galaxy Note 8, which also has a 3.5mm jack and MicroSD card. There's really nothing that my 4-generations newer, work-mandated iPhone has, in terms of functionality and definitely battery life, that Note 8 does not. iPhones are about sexy impracticality, and that's clearly where market has gone (Unlike S2 & S5, Note 8 also cannot be held without a case) - I'm just a old grouch who misses the olden days :).
You can turn on do not disturb.
Solved problems.
However, they really are terrible for podcasts and audiobooks. There aren’t any real bookmarking features to speak of. For that, I use a Rockbox-compatible player (my preference is for a refurbished old HDD-based iPod with a new battery and SD card storage).
You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stressing the jack.
+1, it's a great audiophile quality tiny little player.
i recently got a HiBy R3 Pro Saber, but still frequently come back to my Rockbox'ed Clip+ for its much smaller size.
1. https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-r3-pro-saber
Sansa Clip+s with Rockbox is the perfect solution. I went through three before being unable to pick up any more without paying triple price.
Why do great products disappear?!
I have had two Clip+ in the last 15 years. I retired the first one because I broke the clip off; it still works otherwise. I was using them about 2 hours a day until the pandemic.
Now I am using an hiby R3, which is quite clunkier, but allows me to choose between microsd storage and streaming from the phone in high quality, while also having 2.5mm balanced IEMs (kind of a gimmick, but I like their sound a lot).
edit: and of course being able to finally ditch USB-mini is great.
I'm not sure what causes these players to become unresponsive. It's happened to me when it tries to play an unusual file or after I've transferred music to the device and left it plugged into the computer for a while.
They are still my favorite standalone portable mp3 player, even with the stock firmware.
If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services?
I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad?
I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system?
Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?
Because Spotify et al doesn't give you a big directory full of MP3s. On top of that, the physical interface and features of a small dedicated player is a better user experience.
Smartphones can play offline media. They can play media hosted on a private server. Nobody’s forcing any smartphone user to use Spotify in particular. There’s always alternatives like VLC and countless others that offer that same functionality.
To me, a dedicated player is redundant hardware with less processing power and refinement than a typical smartphone.
Even Apple, king of the locked down proprietary experience, has a Music app with the option to completely disable and hide their streaming service from even being visible. You can sync music via a USB cable or WiFi from local files just like it was an original iPod.
Sometimes offline requires more effort. I would rather my kid have a dedicated MP3 player that does just that instead of a phone that requires locking down with too many points of breach. Way more cheaper to replace too compared to a lost/damaged smartphone.
The other thing is, most smartphones today are insanely over-complicated and not reliable at all. They consume an insane amount of system resources, their battery life is piss-poor, they're constantly being updated which leads to more instability. And new devices aren't necessarily backwards compatible with old apps, meaning you might end up with a phone just for music anyway, or end up losing a useful app. A dedicated device with a simpler RTOS can actually function faster, better, more reliably, for longer.
And to top it all off, the software of a Sony Walkman is usually top-notch. Good EQ presets, an interface designed to make it easy to navigate, with all the player options you want, with UX front and center. Quality control is high because you have to assume the user will never update the firmware.
And having a bunch of MP3s by default is just the simplest thing you can do. Usually the software auto-indexes and sorts and creates playlists etc by the ID3 tags, but if not, you can organize them manually into folders and manual playlists. You have pretty much total control over the music selection, experience, quality.
I don't have to worry about my music being removed because the licensing changed at the streaming provider. I tried various streaming services and all of them removed music from me at some point. This isn't something that's particularly negotiable for me.
I can trivially add songs that aren't on a streaming service using youtube-dl or similar.
I can change songs by pressing a physical button on the side of the player, meaning it doesn't have to leave my pocket and I don't have to look at it. This is particularly useful while exercising.
My main criticism is that this is all redundant hardware with basically no unique capabilities.
Even if the DAC is extra special, that’s something you can get on a phone via USB.
It gets more and more difficult to have a UI dedicated to offline music - you can disable streaming, but you can't disable the 'Radio' section of the Music app for example.
Similarly, the user experience has got quite a bit worse for navigating your catalogue: 10 years or so ago, you used to be able to click the Name of the Artist or Album that was playing, and it would jump to either the artist or the album respectively: these days, on iOS 15, doing that does nothing other than jump back to the currently playing song list (so current album normally), neither does hold-and-press. I have to navigate with the back button, or go back through library, and find the artist each time, or use search.
There are third part dedicated apps and I've tried some of them (and bought Ecoute and VOX), but they're not perfect either.
I need my smartphone to do a whole bunch of things outside playing music, and restricting myself to specific models with physical audio control buttons and small screens makes the market a lot smaller and would probably leave me with a poorer phone than picking one without needing to think about its ability to play music while exercising. I did this for my previous phone and the result wasn't very pleasant, so went with the separate players this time around.
Different headphones might be an option, but again a lot of the better phones are ditching headphone jacks, so it would be restricting my phone options.
- They don’t use any mobile data, and work when in a mobile-phone black spot (e.g. the national parks I go to most weekends). This is the main one.
- I can store all my music on there, without needing to use any storage space on my phone.
- They last forever with some basic maintenance. My iPod was made in 2006. I’ve upgraded the battery and replaced the HDD with an SD-card, but otherwise it just keeps on going.
- I can switch EQ profiles on my Walkman super-easily to suit different music or headphones. No navigating menus, it’s done in under a second.
- Tactile controls and voiced menus on my Rockboxed iPod. I can use the device entirely without looking at the screen. Handy when driving, but also useful when jogging or cycling, any other time you’d rather not stare at a screen instead of being aware of your environment.
- I can load them up with the exact pressing of music I want to listen to. For many old albums, which have gone though a dozen re-releases and remasters, this makes a difference. In fact, for some albums I have several different releases on my player, all with their distinct character, pros and cons.
- Brilliant bookmarking in Rockbox for audiobooks. Super customisable. And dedicated players never do a software update and lose your state. It’s always ready to go, precisely where I left it.
- Car mode. Brilliant for cars like my weekender that predate proper phone connectivity. Rockbox will automatically pause your audiobook when you turn off the ignition and start again when you’re back.
- Ability to enable dynamic range compression to combat road noise. All in a few button presses, without looking at the screen.
Are they for everyone? Of course not. But all of the above things matter to me personally.
I use iPod Classics, I haven’t tried rockboxing any, though. I’ve been meaning to but haven’t yet.
Many artists I like aren’t on all (or any) of the streaming platforms. I also still buy CDs and generally like owning my copies as much as I can.
I hate user interface changes/companies like Spotify having the ability to disable basic features on a whim
No internet, buy once/no ads/no drm, and no touchscreen are important to me. The click wheel is just so good lol
I’ve started using my old iPod video again, and enjoying it for music, but curious on your use case for it as deviated audiobooks. How did you rebuild it specifically for audiobooks? Just toss RockBox on it?
I also generated “talk files” to voice the filenames.
My Walkman is an NW-A45 upgraded with custom firmware from www.nwmods.ml.
There’s theoretical stuff about losing access to music but there’s the entirely practical issues that come from playing music off of a remote server that has to track plays etc vs stuff on disk and a software stack that doesn’t have to be concerned about new features or some upselling to meet KPIs.
And of course a dedicated player is just a player, so you’re gonna be able to quickly open and do stuff. The problem with Omnidevices is you gotta first navigate to the single purpose thing
This has happened to me noticeably a bunch of times. It happened on Spotify, which I’ve since switched away from, but it happens on Tidal too (which I use now). I’m not sure if Spotify still has this feature, but Tidal will show me a song “grayed out” if it was on a playlist but it’s unavailable now. It isn’t often, but sometimes songs/albums that I really like just… go away. You wouldn’t always notice, but it is definitely a very real issue!
* Offline mode still doesn't work properly, after literally years of development. If you lose connection while streaming and want to switch to your 'downloaded albums'? Nope, the app will hang on a blank screen or crash. As londoner, this means spotify basically doesn't work on the tube at all - again, _even in offline-mode_.
* App will generally blank screen, hang, or crash semi-regularly for no apparent reason at least a couple times a day.
* Audio quality is awful. The default is 96kbps, which I believe even the most untrained listening can hear the crumminess of.
* Tons of missing music, even from mainstream artists.
* UI makes it difficult to navigate playlists <-> artist <-> song <-> album, traversing the hierarchy of music associations
* UI prioritises pushing podcast & other unwanted commercial content at you, make it difficult to find what you want and navigate the library
Then you've got the scumminess of the company itself that you alluded to (not paying artists, toxic corporate politics, etc).
Is this still true with latest iPhone? I would expect that iPhone hardware is not a limiting factor for audio quality (assuming a wired adaptor for HiFi headphones)
Some older devices I've owned had good-quality DACs - a Palm Treo being the best. My current ThinkPad has a downright awful DAC, to the point where music sounds _better_ over my Bluetooth headphones (Audio-Technica ATH-M50xBT) than when plugged straight in. The quality issues are even more egregious for the cheap dock I use for my work MacBook Pro, which puts out so much electrical noise over the headphone jack as to be annoying even in in Zoom calls.
[EDIT: looks like the Apple 3.5 mm headphone dongle has a good DAC, see other comments by hug/JohnJamesRambo below]
The latest iPhone doesn't have a DAC in it for headphones. The little 3.5mm-to-lightning dongle is active -- it contains a tiny DAC/amp powered by the lightning port.
Is the tiny lightning dongle a good DAC? The answer is largely "it's fine". Anyone who isn't on the cork-sniffing side of audiophile trends will find it acceptable, assuming the amp is capable of driving the load of whatever headphones you're plugging into it.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
I remember when I had a first gen iPhone and the call quality was atrocious with AT&T compared to my RAZR on Verizon. You get used to it over time but back to back it was pretty dramatic.
https://www.whathifi.com/advice/how-to-play-hi-res-music-you...
Quoting the article:
"Next, you need a decent DAC such as the Audioquest DragonFly Cobalt, Cyrus soundKey or Chord Mojo 2 and a good pair of headphones, such as the Grado SR325x, Shure Aonic 3 or Austrian Audio Hi-X55.
This is just a starting point, of course. Don’t be afraid to build up to a more revealing system. You could combine the Chord Hugo 2 DAC with a pair of Beyerdynamic T1 (3rd Generation) headphones for a more premium set-up. That might be a touch overkill and punishingly transparent for an iPhone, but these are hi-res files, after all."
More to the point I don't want dongles for my phone either. These are all solutions for Apple cheapening the product.
I’ve got a decent quality pro audio interface and monitor headphones. I’ve also got airpod pros. The AirPods sound much much better and I prefer listening to anything with them.
It’s all subjective.
> I’m not an audiophile, and I’m sure said people would blanch if they read about the files I play. But the audio quality is a noticeable upgrade from my iPhone 8. It sounds so much clearer, especially in the midrange. Its EQ settings also add extra sparkle and pop, for want of better words! It’s the biggest uplift in sound I’ve experienced since I bought AKG monitors for home.
According to gsmarena measurements, the output of the iPhone 8 is extremely accurate across the entire spectrum[1]. Sampling a few gsmarena reviews, this is also true for a typical modern Samsung or Xiaomi phone, or even an ancient iPhone 4s.
I believe accurate audio quality is indeed a solved problem, and what the author's describe as an upgrade in quality is just more pleasantly tuned (though distorted) EQ settings (c.f. the "warm" sound of vinyl vs accurate redbook CD-audio).
[1] https://www.gsmarena.com/apple_iphone_8-review-1664p7.php#
[0]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=in.krosbits.mu...
Boy... what a massive range of prices. There's a touchscreen-less device for $75, one resembling the one described by the author at $350, an $850 model with different chassis and higher output but nothing else I can immediately see, and then models jumping up to $1100, $1400, $3200 (!), and even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper. I was vaguely interested in such a product but even $350 seemed too much, let alone the other ranges of products with, for the general audience, not much in the way of obvious differing benefits.
Give me a dedicated interface if you’re gonna charge me that much for a dedicated device! At least comparable to an iPod nano in “time to play mp3”
For instance Sony's audio branch is probably completely separate from the camera branch, which is separate from the TV branch, which doesn't talk to the EV car branch. I don't know if financially they are separate companies, but from what I got they are clearly cut divisions.
I imagine them as an archipelago of products and services, all under a common flag, but only talking to each others by delegations.
For instance Sony has a NFC venture that is really good with encryption and hardware data transfers, it's even integrated in their VAIO computer line. Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
They also support Felica (NFC-F) on most of their hardware.
> Yet their Network Walkman was an utter pile of poop when it came to move songs from the computer to the encrypted MD disc.
The only NFC part in the walkman is pairing headphones by touching them - something I actually enjoyed!
Now I wish music could be transferred in the same way!
https://www.head-fi.org/showcase/shanling-m3-portable-digita...
I was also skeptical, but after hearing the difference, I'm not coming back. I'm rediscovering my favorite tracks! I'm hearing instruments in the background that I couldn't hear before!!
> even $3600 (!!!) which is apparently made out of a gold-plated copper
TBH I don't care much about gold, but 40h battery life? That speaks to me. And if there's as much of an audible difference as I got from my middle range NW-Z507, I'll be happy to spend $3600 on an item that brings me happiness every single day.
You’ll be happy to hear that you also get that on the cheap low-end devices!
It won't matter much if their quality is so poor I don't want to bother listening, or if the interface doesn't provide hardware buttons meaning I won't be able to skip tracks in my car.
I'll get one and see how I like it!
One of my most cherished personal mottoes: "If the answer involves giving money to Sony, you asked the wrong question."
If you have a full Sony setup (walkman + headphones) DSEE Extreme sounds just like that, and seems to be purely software.
One of my "tests" is to run my favorite Pavarotti rendition of Verdi's La donna e mobile - with DSEE Extreme on, it's night and day.
However, on my normal FLACs, it's far less important.
Some people even dislike it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sony/comments/ipcqf9/dsee_extreme_o...
I’ve played pipe organs that do the same thing with “resultant” stops to fake 32’ or 64’ stops.
We must have very different definitions of "budget" because 200 EUR for MP3 player is nowhere close to budget line in times when you can buy decent budget phones for that money or how much I spent for great cassette Panasonic walkman. He is also comparing prices of technology at peak with price of technology pretty much nobody buys anymore and they should be giving pretty much for free.
Btw 16GB model having 12.26GB available capacity I'd expect from some Android phone and not dumb MP3 player.
That's always nice, although I struggle to see the need for an additional device to play mp3's at this point...
https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-M11Plus-Resolution-Portable-Blue...
https://www.amazon.com/Surfans-F35-Resolution-Music-Player/d...
https://www.amazon.com/iRULU-F20-Bluetooth-Lossless-Resoluti...
I have a sneaking suspicion that, while I have some "musts," I probably don't even know the right questions to ask, and I guess forums for this kind of thing stopped existing.
Music is very important to me. I'm considering the WM1ZM2, but I've seen a lot of great reviews about the FiiO and Surfans - but the F20 doesn't have Bluetooth (ok if LDAC and AptXhd are supported) and the F35 doesn't have USB-C.
The M11 plus has both BT+ USB-C, along with hardware buttons. If it can give me better audio and battery life than the WM1ZM2, I'm interested!
That there is no wifi in my mind is a feature rather than a bug.
I also like to think that model name is an homage to the hip hop group, N.W.A. :-P
[0] https://www.bestbuy.com/site/sony-walkman-nw-a55-hi-res-16gb...
Until you see something done well, we get seduced by "features" and loose track of how nice a really well design thing can be. (Got to hand it to old Apple, they did know design.)
Your attention is too valuable. We are squandering it on devices that are designed so you can't think clearly.
Also, my GPS can (and has) jumped out of my backpack and dropped over 100ft and worked (and still works) just fine. Not sure I would like to bet my life hoping the same outcome with my phone while I am in the middle of nowhere.
Bag one if you can get it since it has been discontinued.
It is shocking how bad the experience of listening to my own music has become on iphones. Dongles (different for ipads and iphone of course), itunes for windows is barely usable, there is a bug they never fixed where the music player on iOS randomly mismatch the album artwork, and there are so many conflicting gestures that I always end up messing what I am trying to do. And like a year ago an OS update auto-decreases the volume if it deems I am listening too loud. Android isn't an option for me because Google.
But it's a pain to have to carry two devices, manage two batteries.
And I already own the music, legally purchased on itunes and amazon. Why would I rent it?
I use Spotify for previewing, exploring and making some buying decisions but my actual collection is mine. It's lossless, DRM-free and I plan to have it for ages to come.
Granted my music tastes are esoteric but silently modifying my playlists felt grievous. Now I make sure that subscription money goes on supporting artists directly.
Here's a very in-depth showcase of your options: https://barrowclift.me/post/fourth-annual-ios-music-player-s...
For me the killer feature of the desktop music.app is still the option to transcode to a lower bitrate during sync. My lossless music library spans close to 2 TB (and growing) these days. SD cards are very expensive at that kidn of storage - so in contrast to the article sd cards certainly don't provide limitless space.
Anyway. To meet mobile storage requirements I need to transcode it to 256 kbps AAC and I don't want to handle this manually or manage a second lossy library. music.app / iTunes easily does this on the fly during sync.
I'm sure other software / hardare players can do that too - but if it's the same process why would I carry an additional device around? The iPhone is just very convenient for that purpose. Otherwise I really like Sony's Walkman range.
Bag one if you can get it since it has been discontinued.
As a society we already processed and answered this question in the late 00's. PMP's (heh, remember that term?) suck. All-in-one devices are better
Hot-take over.
It's difficult to disentangle this from the switch to streaming and regarding the latter it is very much unclear whether this was a consumer preference or just something that one-sidedly benefitted an oligopolistic music industry and consumers just had to live with it. Even if a preference for streaming apps reflects an uncoerced choice that a majority of consumers made back then or would make today, it's still a hallmark of a well-functioning market and a free society if the needs/preferences of the minority don't go entirely unserved by the market.
It's plain to see that the needs and preferences of minority users are being served too. This NW-A55 device obviously has a following. Sony pumps out a PMP every so often. Music nerds are probably the #1 target for weird enthusiast gear outside of gaming/pop-culture knickknacks.
... but I still think all-in-one devices are better[1] :)
[1]if you consume music just like me, and don't really enjoy the deeper aspects of collecting and curating your own music library
But it's also frustrating when one track in the middle of an album disappears, or when a few tracks from an old playlist are suddenly greyed out for some licensing reason.
For these reasons I started buying actual records of my favorite albums a few years ago. I realized I had spent X amount on 10 years of Google Music (now youtube music) and had nothing to show for it. In fact, during that time tracks had disappeared from my playlists.
So I felt more like a conservator than a music lover buying up old 90s albums.
Perhaps, and perhaps society is re-processing this question and maybe drifting towards a different answer?
Society does change its mind sometimes
> A shitty music app on my phone like Spotify is 1000x more convenient than a dedicated music device will ever be.
Perhaps for you, and you do you. For me,
Pick up phone,
Unlock screen. Shit, doesn't recognize my fingerprint. Again.
Unlock screen with PIN
Navigate to Spotify.
Start spotify, wait for the UX to load.
Try to find that song/albumn I wanted to listen to.
Connect to my headphones/stero.
Hit play
Get a phone call, now ringing over my speakers and the music has stopped
Oh, and it helpfully turns down the volume for me after a while
I'm not quite seeing the convenience here.
Yes, but I think this is being revisited. Vinyl continues to grow for example. Some of us are going away from single devices which can do everything, but can also control and spy on you for everything.
With single devices it feels like you're the curator of a collection just for you. With Spotify it feels like you're just an ear that's being leased.
Even if you don't like physical media, it's nice to have a collection that you can depend on. You never know when Spotify will take stuff away from you, or just won't add more obscure stuff. (Although, given how left wing Spotify is, I was quite surprised that you can find Werwolf by Absurd. I'm not sure how long that will last.)
Many Bluetooth headphones have physical controls for that. E.g. my Marshall headphones have a nifty little "joystick": up/down for volume, left/right for skip, press for pause/accept call, long press to turn on/off. Elegant, minimalistic, easy to remember.
> It’s also nice having a dedicated player that isn’t inundated with notifications and other modern distractions. Separating out ebooks to a dedicated tablet worked the same wonders for my anxiety.
YMMV - I for one would be ridden by the anxiety of missing an important call on my phone while listening to a dedicated music player...
Rockbox was good for Sansa players.
What? Can anyone second this?