There’s good texture to the bass if not outright substance, detail levels are good, and integration of the frequency range is pretty smooth too. The Shanling is equipped with fully balanced audio circuitry with ESS ES9219C DACs and sounds decently punchy. (The M0 Pro can accept cards up to 512 GB.) This, along with a touchscreen that’s trickier to operate than it might be, are the only accommodations you’ll have to make. The lack of built-in memory is a bit of a giveaway, though-any music you want to play will have to be stored on a microSD card. Sacrifices have to be made to create a hi-res audio player for this sort of money, of course, but they’re not obvious in the aluminum and glass construction. Despite being able to deal with properly high-resolution digital audio files, despite having a bright, full-color touchscreen and a battery that should last you for 15 hours from a single charge, the Shanling M0 Pro weighs virtually nothing and is around the same size as an Apple Watch. If it’s true portability you want, don’t look any further. And given a decent quality of digital audio file to deal with, the Sony is a spacious, detailed, and quite spirited listen that will have you choosing “just one more song” long after you should have started doing something else. The dinky little NW-A306 is built and finished to the standard you expect from Sony, has an absolute fistful of functionality where both wired and wireless listening is concerned, and with careful use can eke a single charge out to over 30 hours of playback. Luckily there’s a microSD card slot here that can handle cards of 512 GB (for sure) and 1 TB (anecdotally).įrom here, all the news is good. The NW-A306 has a nominal 32 GB, but Android 12 knocks that down to more like 18 GB. After all, you’ve decided to take music playback responsibilities away from your phone, haven’t you? Oh, and the touchscreen could be more responsive too.įortunately, the biggest effect this has is not on sound quality (which is-spoiler alert-very agreeable indeed) but on internal memory. It seems a strange decision on Sony’s part to give its NW-A306 portable music player (the first Sony product called a “Walkman” in an awfully long time) an Android 12 operating system that duplicates a lot of the functions of your smartphone. Subscriptions help fund the work we do every day. com and our print magazine (if you'd like). Special offer for Gear readers: Get a 1-year subscription to WIRED for $5 ($25 off). To a lesser or greater extent, they’ll all make you wonder what you ever heard in that smartphone in the first place.įor more WIRED audio guides, check out our Best Gifts for Audiophiles, Best Bluetooth Speakers, Best Soundbars and Best Wired Headphones lists. It’s a wide-ranging and disparate bunch, but they all have one thing in common. Here we’ve selected your five most compelling options, from sub-£100 entry-level charmers to entire “pocket-size high-end audio system-cum-lavish accessory” devices that cost almost £4K. Apple knew the truth of this, but it couldn’t prevent the iPod in all its forms from being cannibalized by the iPhone.īut there are more dedicated, more intrepid brands than Apple that understand the benefit of keeping the music player alive. Because no matter if it’s called a digital audio player, a portable music player, or (for those who enjoy the old skool) an MP3 player, it has been designed to take care of one very specific piece of business. So if you’re serious about portable listening, leave your smartphone to do what it’s good for and get yourself a dedicated music player. Even if you toss out those dreadful headphones that came with it, your smartphone sounds dull or hazy or weedy-or all three all at once. It’s the same as the sound of your laptop in this respect-the design prioritizes loads of other things, and there’s an incredible amount of electrical activity and noise going on inside that basically scuppers the chances of it sounding in any way good. How could it be? After all, the digital-to-analog converter, the headphone amplification, and all the other hardware that goes into delivering a great music player are nothing more than afterthoughts when a company is specifying a smartphone. But you know as well as we do that it’s not much of a music player. After all, it’s a handy GPS, a very acceptable camera, a brilliant internet portal, and probably quite a decent telephone. We’ve got nothing against your smartphone, not really.
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