Lower-resolution music files, including MP3s, can benefit from Sony’s DSEE Ultimate technology, which tries its best to restore what’s lost in the audio signal. Super-high resolution, for those who are wondering.

The selling point of the NW-A306 is support for high-resolution music formats up to 384 kHz PCM and 11.3 MHz DSD. The hope with the more affordable NW-A306 music player must be to take a larger market share in a small market, by offering top class sound at a lower price. As a result, such music players tend to cost a small fortune because the customer group is particularly interested in good sound. With the mobile phone, separate players and portable DACs have become a niche market. Besides, most mobile phones now lack a headphone output, so using your best wired headphones will be a bit of a hassle. And that it can have much better battery life without a camera, GPS and the like. One argument for a pure music player is that it can have a dedicated signal path for music. The Sony Walkman NW-A306 features Android’s operating system. But shouldn’t these be long gone too? After all, we use mobiles for most things now. The brand still exists, but now in the form of digital music players. It’s been a few decades since the Sony Walkman was synonymous with portable cassette players.

Sony walkman spotify player