(Edit: My original introduction got swallowed by the site (probably because there was an emoji in it):
I’ve been a long-time Fiio owner (I’ve had three, since before “buy a Fiio” was a thing on here, in fact 😉) but I decided this time to look around for alternatives…
…because the screen on my Fiio M11-Pro had become chipped and unpleasant to use. I was never a fan of the size of it either, and the razor-sharp squared corners do not make it nice to carry around in a pocket.
So I took to the interent, read some reviews, and eventually I settled on a Sony Walkman (NW-A306 to be exact).
It’s an Android OS-based machine and benefits – or suffers, depending how firmly you adhere to platform cult behaviour – from the same things you’d find with an Android phone, loads of Google bloatware being the main bugbear. You may not enjoy the thought of fiddling “under the bonnet” of your music player, but I checked out some online guides and after downloading a package manager I safely removed all the calendar, email, cloud storage etc apps that affect performance and battery life of any machine. It now runs happily all day on one charge.
It’s a tiny thing, and extremely light (108 grams / 3.8 oz) but very well designed ergonomically. All the buttons are down one side and once you remember where they are navigating your playlist becomes easy. The corners are smoothly rounded too.
I use Bluetooth headphones so can’t really comment on how well it would drive a grown-up pair, but I can’t tell any difference between it and the Fiio. I’m sure there are techical limitations due to the chipset, amplifier etc, used but I doubt any casual user could tell either. These portables are designed to be used in the real world not a dedicated listening room, after all.
All and all it’s great and I wouldn’t go back to the model I had before now.
My wife just bought one and it’s really good. I bought a Fiio (same model as yours) a few years back and wished I’d have bought one of these at about half the price.
A. “Any casual user” is probably going to use their phone for music playing, nowadays.
For a person who wants their phone to just be a phone, that device looks OK.
I’m a lover of MediaMonkey on PC, but I found it’s Android version annoying. I use Musicolet on my phone to play music (not very often these days).
I am a casual user. I bought some B&W 720 PX7 se2 headphones in the sales to upgrade my iPhone audio. I’m not sure I could do with 2 devices and (possibly) 2 sets of headphones for my EDC*.
*Every Day Carry. This seems to be a thing in Insta and TikTok so I have adopted it.
I want to listen to my library in FLAC (yes I know, why bother if I’m in a noisy environment). Those files take up a lot of room. There’s a nearly full 1Tb SD card in the Sony. I could look it up but aren’t phones with SC cards rarer these days?
My Google Pixel phone has no memory card slot, but it plays flac files. I have 175 songs on my phone (about 60% are flac, the rest are mp3) and there’s room for about a thousand if I wanted.
Who would want the faff of loading a terrabyte of music onto a phone’s memory card?
If it’s all fairly short (4-5 minute) flac files, that’s about 40,000 of them. It would take ages. Best part of a day.
I’ve about 400GB of ALAC files on the MicroSD card installed in my phone. It’s quicker to sync the files to the card by removing it and connecting directly to my laptop. I use a tool called FreeFileSync to do this, as it can pick up any files that have been changed or renamed.
For a music player I use Lyrion, formerly known as Logitech Media Server. It’s a bit of a faff to get working on an Android phone, but it’s the only way I could find support for sort order tags and classical works tags.
I use that too, but have recently found Plexamp to be a more pleasurable experience. Can listen to all my songs wherever I am in the world as long as I have a WiFi connection. Can also download albums wherever I am using WiFi for offline listening. as my data plan is now very meagre.
I suppose the key differences are that I don’t have big collection of FLAC files and my approach to noisy environments is to get the balance between ANC and some musicality right in my headphones. I’m actually quite keen on having the volume a bit lower which ANC helps with.
I dare say nice noise cancelling headphones and FLAC files would sound even better but I fear my inherent laziness (ripping my CDs once to 192 nearly drove me mad) and the joy of streaming meaning I can listen to pretty much whatever I want whenever I want without the planning.
And the sound quality is terrific – certainly compared to my old Walkman CD player.
Agree about the time it takes to rip a library. In an unusually wise move, when I started to digitise I heard about FLAC and just started using it, so I don’t have to contemplate doing it over.
I have a memory card in the second slot in my phone SIM drawer. Musicolet is telling me that it currently holds 20073 songs that would take 11653:34:42 to play. This is definitely not ridiculous in any way at all.
As it happens, yes, there is. I bought the recent box set of Songs From The Wood. And, providing a sort of double jeopardy, I have a Christmas Compilation that includes Songs From The Wood. But I’m not deleting the card. There’s too much good stuff on it. At least one cd that was ripped to it was based on your own enthusiastic recommendation.
My first hi-res Digital Audio Player was a Sony (NW ZX2 if I recall) and so I know that they are good.
However, I moved from Sony to Fiio (currently an M11-S) and I find the Fiio is better. I know that its probably changed in the 10 years or so since I had a Sony, but I found their implementation of Android restrictive – there were limits on the SD card size, the usual Sony thing of adding their “bits” in the OS which were difficult to bypass etc etc).
Aside from the excellent sound quality, what I really like about the Fiio is that its Roon Ready so I can stream from my NAS via Roon direct to the player (so don’t have to worry about SD card capacity), it plays Apple Music natively and I like its Pure Music mode which shuts down all the Android crap in the background.
I’m sure the newer generation Sony’s can probably do all this but I’m happy with the Fiio. Plus, I tend to use mainly for late night listening at home and not out and about so it being “chunky” is not a concern
Re the Sony Android implementation – stripping out all the gunk software was the tough part of setting it up but I am pretty good with ‘puters. I can see how that might be a daunting process to a “layman” (not meaning you, obviously) though.
Is the Roon connection just for home wifi, or can you use it over the internet?
I only use Roon at home. They do have Roon ARC which works over the internet, but I haven’t gotten around to setting it up yet (I don’t really have a need to access my whole library whilst out and about).
I’m a Roon user at home as well. However, I’ve never found Roon Arc reliable enough to bother with. I don’t really need to access my own music library on the move when Spotify or Tidal provide me with all the music I’ll ever need.
I haven’t bought a FiiO for years. I’m so pleased they weren’t around until 2007, or I’d have been out of a job years before my last audio employer went bust (in early 2009).
Anybody know what percentage of the population plays their on-the-move music on a dedicated player rather than a phone? My own survey based on walking through airports, French, British and Spanish cities and a small village in the Languedoc suggests 0.034%
My Fiio is gathering dust in a drawer. It sounds fantastic but the UI is rubbish. The fact that it doesn’t remember where you were in a song/podcast when you power it back up is silly. I really only use it now for travelling.
It’s true the built in Fiio app for music is appalling but I avoided mentioning that because one can usually find an Android version of your preferred music software to use on it.
Isn’t this the HiFi conundrum in a nutself? There is always better to be had but at cost and inconvienience.
Personally, cables for headphones, carrying two devices, plugging stuff in to add/take stuff off and having to spend extra on an additional device are all things that I will trade a bit of sound quality for not having to do.
The ability to use a device I am already going to carry, that allows me to download albums and audiobooks online, that subscribes to pods is just too handy to ignore for an improvement in audio quality that I would probably have to concentrate on to notice,
by 34 Comments 
(Edit: My original introduction got swallowed by the site (probably because there was an emoji in it):
I’ve been a long-time Fiio owner (I’ve had three, since before “buy a Fiio” was a thing on here, in fact 😉) but I decided this time to look around for alternatives…
…because the screen on my Fiio M11-Pro had become chipped and unpleasant to use. I was never a fan of the size of it either, and the razor-sharp squared corners do not make it nice to carry around in a pocket.
So I took to the interent, read some reviews, and eventually I settled on a Sony Walkman (NW-A306 to be exact).
It’s an Android OS-based machine and benefits – or suffers, depending how firmly you adhere to platform cult behaviour – from the same things you’d find with an Android phone, loads of Google bloatware being the main bugbear. You may not enjoy the thought of fiddling “under the bonnet” of your music player, but I checked out some online guides and after downloading a package manager I safely removed all the calendar, email, cloud storage etc apps that affect performance and battery life of any machine. It now runs happily all day on one charge.
It’s a tiny thing, and extremely light (108 grams / 3.8 oz) but very well designed ergonomically. All the buttons are down one side and once you remember where they are navigating your playlist becomes easy. The corners are smoothly rounded too.
I use Bluetooth headphones so can’t really comment on how well it would drive a grown-up pair, but I can’t tell any difference between it and the Fiio. I’m sure there are techical limitations due to the chipset, amplifier etc, used but I doubt any casual user could tell either. These portables are designed to be used in the real world not a dedicated listening room, after all.
All and all it’s great and I wouldn’t go back to the model I had before now.
My wife just bought one and it’s really good. I bought a Fiio (same model as yours) a few years back and wished I’d have bought one of these at about half the price.
Does “any casual user” ever buy anything like this nowadays?
A. “Any casual user” is probably going to use their phone for music playing, nowadays.
For a person who wants their phone to just be a phone, that device looks OK.
I’m a lover of MediaMonkey on PC, but I found it’s Android version annoying. I use Musicolet on my phone to play music (not very often these days).
I think I am a casual user who wants a better sound than a phone will provide. I know it’s not logical but I’m a complicated guy.
I am a casual user. I bought some B&W 720 PX7 se2 headphones in the sales to upgrade my iPhone audio. I’m not sure I could do with 2 devices and (possibly) 2 sets of headphones for my EDC*.
*Every Day Carry. This seems to be a thing in Insta and TikTok so I have adopted it.
I want to listen to my library in FLAC (yes I know, why bother if I’m in a noisy environment). Those files take up a lot of room. There’s a nearly full 1Tb SD card in the Sony. I could look it up but aren’t phones with SC cards rarer these days?
Android phones usually have an SD card slot. Apple have never had an SD card slot in their phones.
I have a decent, newish Samsung Galaxy, which doesn’t.
My Google Pixel phone has no memory card slot, but it plays flac files. I have 175 songs on my phone (about 60% are flac, the rest are mp3) and there’s room for about a thousand if I wanted.
Who would want the faff of loading a terrabyte of music onto a phone’s memory card?
If it’s all fairly short (4-5 minute) flac files, that’s about 40,000 of them. It would take ages. Best part of a day.
I’ve about 400GB of ALAC files on the MicroSD card installed in my phone. It’s quicker to sync the files to the card by removing it and connecting directly to my laptop. I use a tool called FreeFileSync to do this, as it can pick up any files that have been changed or renamed.
For a music player I use Lyrion, formerly known as Logitech Media Server. It’s a bit of a faff to get working on an Android phone, but it’s the only way I could find support for sort order tags and classical works tags.
Instructions here: https://forums.lyrion.org/forum/user-forums/general-discussion/1674045-announcement-running-lms-on-an-android-device
I use that too, but have recently found Plexamp to be a more pleasurable experience. Can listen to all my songs wherever I am in the world as long as I have a WiFi connection. Can also download albums wherever I am using WiFi for offline listening. as my data plan is now very meagre.
Do it once and move the SD card from device to device. I’ve not done the whole library this decade.
I suppose the key differences are that I don’t have big collection of FLAC files and my approach to noisy environments is to get the balance between ANC and some musicality right in my headphones. I’m actually quite keen on having the volume a bit lower which ANC helps with.
I dare say nice noise cancelling headphones and FLAC files would sound even better but I fear my inherent laziness (ripping my CDs once to 192 nearly drove me mad) and the joy of streaming meaning I can listen to pretty much whatever I want whenever I want without the planning.
And the sound quality is terrific – certainly compared to my old Walkman CD player.
Agree about the time it takes to rip a library. In an unusually wise move, when I started to digitise I heard about FLAC and just started using it, so I don’t have to contemplate doing it over.
I have a memory card in the second slot in my phone SIM drawer. Musicolet is telling me that it currently holds 20073 songs that would take 11653:34:42 to play. This is definitely not ridiculous in any way at all.
Is there any Tull in there though? If so, wipe the card in case you accidentally play a Tull song.
As it happens, yes, there is. I bought the recent box set of Songs From The Wood. And, providing a sort of double jeopardy, I have a Christmas Compilation that includes Songs From The Wood. But I’m not deleting the card. There’s too much good stuff on it. At least one cd that was ripped to it was based on your own enthusiastic recommendation.
Well if there is a recoomendation of mine on there then it should stay. I hope you grew to love whatever I was blathering on about at the time.
But be careful of the Tull. Especially in front of young people.
This is the one to get
https://www.whathifi.com/features/i-saw-fiios-cassette-player-at-ces-2024-and-it-had-me-feeling-warm-fuzzy-and-frustrated
Not *that* casual, Dai 😊
My first hi-res Digital Audio Player was a Sony (NW ZX2 if I recall) and so I know that they are good.
However, I moved from Sony to Fiio (currently an M11-S) and I find the Fiio is better. I know that its probably changed in the 10 years or so since I had a Sony, but I found their implementation of Android restrictive – there were limits on the SD card size, the usual Sony thing of adding their “bits” in the OS which were difficult to bypass etc etc).
Aside from the excellent sound quality, what I really like about the Fiio is that its Roon Ready so I can stream from my NAS via Roon direct to the player (so don’t have to worry about SD card capacity), it plays Apple Music natively and I like its Pure Music mode which shuts down all the Android crap in the background.
I’m sure the newer generation Sony’s can probably do all this but I’m happy with the Fiio. Plus, I tend to use mainly for late night listening at home and not out and about so it being “chunky” is not a concern
Re the Sony Android implementation – stripping out all the gunk software was the tough part of setting it up but I am pretty good with ‘puters. I can see how that might be a daunting process to a “layman” (not meaning you, obviously) though.
Is the Roon connection just for home wifi, or can you use it over the internet?
I only use Roon at home. They do have Roon ARC which works over the internet, but I haven’t gotten around to setting it up yet (I don’t really have a need to access my whole library whilst out and about).
https://roon.app/en/arc
I’m a Roon user at home as well. However, I’ve never found Roon Arc reliable enough to bother with. I don’t really need to access my own music library on the move when Spotify or Tidal provide me with all the music I’ll ever need.
Somewhere in the Fens, someone is feeling discombobulated.
I haven’t bought a FiiO for years. I’m so pleased they weren’t around until 2007, or I’d have been out of a job years before my last audio employer went bust (in early 2009).
Anybody know what percentage of the population plays their on-the-move music on a dedicated player rather than a phone? My own survey based on walking through airports, French, British and Spanish cities and a small village in the Languedoc suggests 0.034%
My Fiio is gathering dust in a drawer. It sounds fantastic but the UI is rubbish. The fact that it doesn’t remember where you were in a song/podcast when you power it back up is silly. I really only use it now for travelling.
It’s true the built in Fiio app for music is appalling but I avoided mentioning that because one can usually find an Android version of your preferred music software to use on it.
Isn’t this the HiFi conundrum in a nutself? There is always better to be had but at cost and inconvienience.
Personally, cables for headphones, carrying two devices, plugging stuff in to add/take stuff off and having to spend extra on an additional device are all things that I will trade a bit of sound quality for not having to do.
The ability to use a device I am already going to carry, that allows me to download albums and audiobooks online, that subscribes to pods is just too handy to ignore for an improvement in audio quality that I would probably have to concentrate on to notice,
Wise words. I’ll bet you’re good at Wordle too .
I’m good, but I’m no Bardartdog.
4 eagles in 12 holes, he’s one lucky boy. . ..