Kevin Boone: Who needs a<br>dedicated portable music player in 2026?

Kevin Boone

Home

Contact

About

Software

Articles

Who needs a<br>dedicated portable music player in 2026?

There was a time when almost everybody owned a portable music player.<br>The Apple iPod was a household name, but there were many alternatives –<br>often superior ones. Now almost everybody has a smartphone, and modern<br>smartphones are pretty competent at playing audio. So it’s hard to avoid<br>asking who needs a dedicated music player these days. Can you even buy<br>one if you do?

To answer the easier question, yes, these products are still<br>available. There are cheap, nasty ones from manufacturers you’ve<br>probably never heard of, and top-quality ones from established brands<br>like Sony, Astell & Kern, and FIIO. In fact, sales of these devices<br>seem to be on the increase, despite the ubiquity of smartphones.

Most (all?) decent-quality portable music players now run Android<br>internally. It may not be obvious, and the user interface might not look<br>like one you see on a smartphone, but Android is there, all the same. So<br>the question inevitably arises:

Why<br>not just use an Android smartphone as a music player?

After all, you’ll be running much the same software and hardware with<br>a dedicated music player, and the user experience will be similar. In<br>fact, a player like FIIO’s JM21<br>is essentially an Android cellphone without the antenna, and some added<br>audio bits. It’s a full-fat Google Android experience with all that<br>entails, for good or ill.

On the other hand, Sony’s<br>NW-A306 does more to conceal its Android internals, and the Astell<br>& Kern range goes even further. Still, most of these devices offer<br>the possibility of running regular Android apps, even if it isn’t<br>entirely obvious how to install them. They all have a built-in music<br>player app, which may offer advantages over the generic ones, but not<br>always.

Android is in there somewhere: the<br>brutalist simplicity of the Astell & Kern Kann

Because they’re running Android, these dedicated players have similar<br>disadvantages to Android smartphones, including relatively long start-up<br>and shut-down times, comparatively poor battery life, and considerable<br>size and weight. When I use terms like “relatively” and “comparatively”,<br>I’m measuing these Android-based players against pre-Android devices<br>like the Cowon D2, which is the size of a match<br>book, boots in less than two seconds, and offers 50+ hours of continuous<br>playback. The D2 is an old-fashioned player, with no support for any<br>kind of network operation, but it serves to illustrate how much we<br>sacrifice, when we run Android on a music player, rather than dedicated<br>audio software.

So, since most contemporary portable music players run Android, with<br>all the disadvantages that entails, and since most of us already carry a<br>smartphone, why bother?

Why you might<br>still want a dedicated music player

It seems to me that there are at least four reasons to continue to<br>use a dedicated portable media player even if you have a<br>smartphone. If you don’t have, or want, a smartphone, then the<br>benefit of a portable music player is clear, and doesn’t need further<br>elaboration.

First, and probably most important, the dedicated player may offer<br>better sound quality, for a number of reasons.

Most obviously, a dedicated player will invariably have a wired<br>headphone connection, something that is woefully lacking in most modern<br>smartphones. The best-sounding headphones are still wired and,<br>although Blueetooth audio is closing the gap, most fussy listeners will<br>still want wired headphones.

Driving the wired headphone socket will likely be separate<br>digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and amplifier chips from established<br>manufacturers, rather than something built into the smartphone’s CPU as<br>an afterthought.

The potential audio improvements won’t stop there: a dedicated player<br>will usually have better analog circuit layout, and beefier power<br>management throughout. It might have a high-accuracy clock to reduce<br>jitter in the DAC. These improvements, of course, only affect wired<br>operation.

Whether you can hear these improvements depends on your source<br>material, your headphones or other hardware, your listening environment,<br>and how fussy you are. One improvement you’ll certainly hear, though, if<br>you use high-impedance wired headphones is the increased headphone<br>voltage. Even the most audio-centric smartphones aren’t designed to<br>drive headphones of this kind.

If you want to use wired headphones, and you’re concerned about the<br>quality of a smartphone’s DAC, you could use an external DAC. These<br>range from tiny plug-in dongles to full-sized hi-fi equipment. Many of<br>even the smallest dongles use the same hardware as a dedicated music<br>player. Adding a dongle won’t give you the improvements associated with<br>the heftier power supply in a dedicated player, because the dongle will<br>still be powered by the smartphone. However, as a minimum, it will give<br>you a wired headphone connection, and...