Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Why would someone spend $200 for an mp3 player in this day and age? We all have smartphones, right? Well, I just did, despite having a smartphone that plays music quite well. So let me try to explain, and try to answer the questions I had about this unit going in. USE CASES This player does not have any WiFi connection, and this cannot do streaming services such as Spotify. So that's not what this is for. This player also does not have any "apps," nor does it play video. It is a music player, a classic "mp3 player" in the iPod mold. Which was fine for me. I have a nice stereo speaker in my dining room to play music while cooking and having dinner. I had been using a Sandisk Clip player to supply music (I am not a Luddite, we do have an Echo for streaming music, but I have a substantial CD collection), but was constantly running up against its limit of a 32gb maximum SD card size. So I wanted a player that could take 128gb or higher cards. When you start looking for those, you quickly see that either you will be looking at cheap Chinese knock-off players that have very spotty build quality and reliability, or at "mid-range" players like this, the FiiO X1, or the Cowon Plenue D. The FiiO X1 runs about half the price of the other two, and I was THIS close to pulling the trigger on it, but reports of balky scroll wheels and non-functional features put me off. So I went with Sony because I have nearly always enjoyed the build quality and performance of their products. This player does have Bluetooth, which means it can connect to speakers and headphones. It does so easily and the connection is quite secure (no dropouts). AptX is available via firmware update. This player also plays every Hi-Res format you can throw at it: AIFF, FLAC, WAV, DSD. I will discuss that below. BUILD QUALITY So, as you can see from the attached pictures, this is a small unit. I have slightly above-average sized hands, and this player feels small in them. It's bigger than an iPod Nano but smaller than a Touch or hard-drive model. It is hefty but not overly heavy. The body feels metallic, perhaps aluminum with a milled "matte" finish (if it is plastic, it's a very convincing approximation of metal). The 3.1" touchscreen is nice looking, and can get bright enough to compete with sunlight. I will say though, on the bad side, there is no oleophobic coating, and the screen picks up fingerprints quite easily, which take a good hard wipe to remove. I have been wiping it on my shirt, and no scratches are evident. UPDATE: I purchased the IVSO tempered glass screen protector. It ameliorates the lack of oleophobic coating on the screen and has both cut down on fingerprints as well as increased the ease of swiping. I highly recommend it. The USB connector is 2.0, which is plenty fast for most audio file transfers. Unfortunately, Sony went with a proprietary connector on the unit. This is a real pain, and I wish it had been USB-C (or at least micro). Another annoyance is that packed into the box, Sony only included that cable, no charger. The unit charges just fine with the various USB cellphone chargers I have, but for safety's sake I would vastly prefer to have a unit chosen by Sony to be a good fit for the player. The battery charges pretty quickly, and Sony's claims of 45 hours of listening time seem quite believable. Overall, as is typical for Sony products, the fit and finish is excellent. No buttons are wobbly, there are no gaps or creaks, and the whole thing inspires confidence. Only the proprietary connector and non-oleophobic screen irk me. USER EXPERIENCE The software is Sony's own interface. It is mostly pretty good. As you can see from my attached pictures, there are four touch icons along the bottom - back, now playing, home, and settings. There are also swipe gestures - from the left gives you track listing, from the top gives you home, from the right is a bookmark menu, and from the bottom are equalizer and sound enhancements. Things are mostly peppy, although a large list of albums with pictures can lag a tad before swiping smoothly, as the images populate. Loading a large amount of music onto an SD card necessitates "Building Database" when you power it up for the first time, and this can take two or three minutes for a large collection. Subsequent additions to your collection take less time, more like 15 seconds. Speaking of album art, I ran into a problem where files that had art tagged would not show the art in the player. Initially I thought this was an issue with resolution, that they had to be very small. It turns out that actually the issue is with the format of jpeg file used. "Progressive" jpegs will not display. "Baseline" jpegs will. So if you have Photoshop, you can just open the file and do a "Save as" and be sure to check the "Baseline" option when saving. You can use quite a large file if you so choose (though 500x500 is plenty big for this screen). Two things I like quite a bit about the software are that 1. you can choose to sort artists only by the album artist, which negates the irritation of having albums broken up when there is a guest artist, duet partner, etc. So everything stays together. 2. there is a separate breakout menu for Hi-Res files, which is nice because typically, I would imagine most people have a smaller selection of those files than standard mp3 or FLAC files. There is an optional suite of software you can install on your Windows PC. I did not do so. The player appears as a USB storage drive when you plug it in, like any Android phone or tablet. I dragged and dropped my music this way. The SD card slot accepts larger cards like 128gb and 256gb. I have not tested it with anything higher, though I've heard reports of 400gb working just fine. PERFORMANCE I do any critical listening with my Sony MDR-7506 studio monitor headphones. Over these headphones, regular mp3 music files sounded ever so slightly cleaner than from the Sandisk Clip player. There are various "enhancement" modes in the equalizer, mostly they just seemed to crank up midrange sounds, and I left them off (nicely, they are set to Off by default). I ripped some of my CDs to FLAC, and downloaded a few Hi-Res AIFF and DSD files. The sound quality over my headphones was excellent. I did some comparisons to ripped mp3 files, and I will say this - compared to a 320kbps mp3, Hi-Res is almost identical to the ear. On a lower bitrate mp3 (e.g. 128kbps) You can pick out slightly cleaner details on things like bass guitar riffs and cymbal hits, which seem to get lost or muddled a bit on mp3. But it is NOT night and day, so don't go in expecting that. What you are buying here is NOT an entirely different experience. To make an analogy, this is not the jump from VHS to DVD, or DVD to Blu-Ray. It's more like Blu-Ray to 4K - you can spot the differences if you know what you're looking for, but it's still easy to enjoy the lower-res format because the difference is not overwhelming (whereas watching a VHS is like medieval eye torture now). While listening to 128kbps mp3s, I still got lost in details and enjoyed the music quite a bit, often thinking "wait, was this Hi-Res?" only to check and see that it wasn't. I guess this is a long way of saying, all of your music will sound good, as long as it was sourced from a CD or a reputable online store. UPDATE: I recently purchased the Sony MDR-1000x noise canceling headphones, which can pair via Bluetooth using Sony's LDAC codec (which is also available by default in Android 8.0 smartphones). I was not really a believer in Bluetooth sound until trying this. Wow! It sounds great, with not even a perceptible difference between wired and wireless sound quality (there IS still a difference, as LDAC does compress things - I just cannot hear it). The NFC function of the player is really nice, too. You just tap the player to your headphones and they connect right away. Having things "just work" is great. UPDATE 2: I have purchased a pair of Sony MDR-Z7 cans for home listening. This player can power them quite easily (they are 70 Ohm impedance headphones). I run the player between 60-70 on the volume meter, or 50-60% of maximum. The player sounds wonderful. So for anyone wondering whether this can power a higher-impedance headphone, I think the answer is certainly yes. My guess would be that if you own cans that run at 150 Ohms or greater, you might need an amplifier. CONCLUSION This is for people with a large off-line digital collection of music who don't want to use their phone as their primary player. It is NOT a streaming music player. Ideally, this would be used in a quiet home environment with a nice stereo system, or paired with a good mid-range or higher set of headphones for commuting. I would not recommend this player for exercise, as it is overkill and for my money too expensive for the risk of dropping (although there is a lanyard hook, FWIW). It is solidly built, plays everything you can throw at it, and has the ability to use very large SD cards. I am happy with my purchase, even at this price. With it, I have more capability than Sandisk's perfectly fine line of players (which I would recommend for exercise). This is the player that works well for my home stereo use case. I have no problems recommending it to someone who needs it for home or commuting use. Do I wish it were 25-50% cheaper? Sure. But sometimes, you get what you pay for. This unit competes with the Cowon Plenue D quite well on price, and is certainly less expensive than a smartphone.