However, presentation of the mid-range is different. The Clip Sport has much more up-front, harder mids, making vocals sound closer to your ears. The softer, more diffuse mids of the iPod Classic are a little easier on the ear, and the Clip Sport can sound a little harsh at times. However, in pure sound quality terms they are roughly comparable – not great, but decent. And there's style to match the substance, with manufacturers also competing on design to deliver players that look as good as they sound. Fan of brutalist architecture? Astell & Kern is the name for you. Something a bit more colorful? See SanDisk or Sony. Want something about the size of a matchbox? Cowon's Plenue D3 is the one – see them all in our guide above. Why do people still use MP3 players? To get a proper view on the SanDisk Clip Sport’s sound quality we compared it with an iPod Classic – a benchmark of reasonable, but not staggering, sound. Maximum volume on the SanDisk is greater, and the width of the soundstage is quite similar. There is an EQ to hand too, but it’s pretty poor. The presets are rather crude, and the custom ‘user’ mode isn’t sophisticated enough to be particularly useful. We test dozens of hi-res portable music players every year at TechRadar, and that means we know exactly which features, specs, file support and wireless audio codecs to look out for.It's important for us to compare the performance of these players against the claims made by their manufacturers, which is why we take the time to make sure the stamina, durability, connectivity and sound quality claims are legit.

The MP3 player market is in such a diminished state that we’ve learnt not to expect much ‘innovation’ in new products, and you don’t find it here either. However, it’s a good budget alternative to an iPod shuffle. Verdict As the name suggests, Lossless Audio doesn't sacrifice any of the musical information: the successors to the WAV format used in CDs, which is also lossless, use more advanced technology to take the audio information and make the file smaller without compromising on quality. There are several versions of Lossless Audio including Apple Lossless, FLAC and WMA Lossless, and as you'll see from our guide above you'll often find that the best MP3 players support at least some of those formats. It’s the same setup we saw in the Clip Zip. However, battery life has been improved hugely since that model. It has gone from 12 hours to 25. These numbers relate to playing 128kbps MP3s on loop, so actual performance will be a fair bit worse. However, it means the difference between charging once a week and every couple of days – a huge improvement. We got through a week’s use off a charge. There are also none of the neat extra bits you get in one of Apple’s players. The Clip Sport won’t work with earphone remote controls, it won’t remember where you were navigating in your music library should you leave the player for quite a while, and it won’t pause music when you unplug your earphones. A big sound quality win for the Clip Sport, though, is codec support. As well as the usual AAC and MP3, the player supports FLAC and OGG files. These aren’t supported by iPods, or Sony’s low-cost ‘sporty’ MP3 players.

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There's lots to love here including an Android 10 operating system with a touchscreen that's smooth and responsive, a punchy, controlled and detailed sound and a premium build. MP3 players won't suit everyone, many prefer the convenience of having all of their music on their phones, but there are plenty of reasons why an MP3 player is a great idea for some people. Is MP3 quality as good as CD?

Although it hasn't been shouted about, four new and quite different-sounding DAC filters are also onboard, which will work if listening in 24-bit/192kHz or less PCM (although they won't work in MQA and DSD formats) and they certainly add value and scope for customization at the level. If your budget stretches to this player and not a penny more, you won't be disappointed. You get a pair of earphones in the box, and they’re of reasonable quality. They’re IEM-type isolating earphones – a bit bassy and with just entry-level sound, but not terrible.Another reason is that not everything you might want to listen to is available on the various streaming services –and not everything that's there today might be there tomorrow, because songs and even artists come and go. By synchronising an MP3 player with your desktop music collection you can always be sure that you can hear what you want to hear. A big bonus for many people is that with your own music collection, you don't need to pay a monthly subscription to listen to it, or to listen to it without advertising. Some people enjoy listening to MP3 players when they work out, so they don't have their phone with them. Whether that's also to keep calls and messages at bay or keep their phone safe.

But it’s not bad. It’s a full colour display, and the interface makes good use of the colour palette. It’s bright, it’s colourful and quite simple too, with none of the fiddliness of some other budget players. We tested the player with multiple pairs of headphones across multiple price ranges, and were stunned with the clarity and exceptional quality of the audio. There’s a reason the Onkyo DP-X1A sits atop this list – it’s a beast in the portable audio world. The player is built with a full version of Android, complete with Wi-Fi connectivity and the Google Play Store, which results in it being kind of like an Android version of the iPod touch, able to do much more than just play music. However, the Onkyo DP-X1A is built for super-high-quality audio, and it's an absolute dream. It supports a range of music formats, including FLAC, OGG, WAV, MP3, ALAC, and more. In terms of hardware, the device has two chipsets, one to power the overall device, and one to handle the DAC and amplifier – resulting in a noise-free experience. It supports a huge range of formats, including DSD(DFF, DSF, ISO), FLAC, WAV, AIFF, ALAC, APE, MP3, WMA, OGG and DCF. Music sounds brilliant and with Bluetooth, you can listen on a range of different devices. Although there's no Wi-Fi streaming available.These days a small cheap player doesn’t need to mean a compromise in sound quality. The SanDisk Clip Sport offers decent sound quality and – as long as you don’t select Europe as your region – masses of volume. We make sure to test each product against its chief competitors too, so you can be sure that if we say so, the product is the best bet for the money. We live with these players for well over a week and run them in religiously so that the components have 'bedded in' before we commence our tests, and we don't finalize our testing until we are certain of the sound quality. The interface is easy to control. Tap through options using the touchscreen, and select the music you want to listen to. It could be more responsive, but you get used to it. Battery life is around nine hours, which isn't amazing, but not terrible either. You don’t have to listen long, hard, or through especially accomplished headphones to realise the M11S is the real deal. In every meaningful music-making respect, it has skills – and in some areas, it’s a genuine expert. Where the NW-A306 is let down is not in its music-playing skill, but slight niggles with its all round usability. During our testing, we found that the menu could be a little unresponsive, the battery longevity would vary and it surprisingly sounded like it struggled when playing a standard 128kbps audio file, which all together let down our all-round experience just a tad (well, by half a star to be exact). But there’s no denying that the positives vastly outweigh the negatives here.