FEATURE:
A Smarter Choice
PHOTO CREDIT: Jean Marc Bonnel/Pexels
Is the Comeback of the MP3 Player a Sign of Things to Come?
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THE slight turn away…
PHOTO CREDIT: Astell & Kern
from digital music is happening. Not that streaming will ever be replaced by physical music. It is convenient and affordable for many of us. I don’t think that it is a bad thing to listen to music digitally. I do it a lot. However, there is this demand for physical music and formats. When it comes to the way we listen to music, though we want to buy vinyl, it is not always the most convenient of methods. You have to be stationery and it is about sitting down and listening to an album. People do want to experience music on the go. I was born in the 1980s, and most of my best days listening to music were about C.D.s and cassettes. I would listen on a Sony Walkman or Discman. Those technologies still have a place today, though they were discontinued. They were replaced by other technologies such as the iPod and MP3 players. The MiniDisc (MD) was discontinued in 2013. When digital music and streaming came in, these physical devices were sort of phased out. Assumed to be irrelevant. Smartphones were seen as the natural successor. Although they are convincement and provide portability, the truth is that smartphones do not have the same quality as other devices. For people who want to listen to music on the go but want an actual music device, it seems that MP3s are experiencing a revival. Earlier this year, What Hi-Fi? provided a guide to the best portable music players. It is true that Smartphones do not provide good quality when it comes to music playing:
“We're sorry to break it to you, but for all of its communication cleverness and photography prowess, your phone is a pretty poor music-playing device.
For all their multi-tasking, modern-day mastery, smartphones simply do not sound good – not out of their built-in speakers, headphone output or over Bluetooth. And that's where dedicated portable music players (or 'DAPs': digital audio players) come in.
In contrast, they are designed first and foremost to store music and play it back in the best quality possible. Not only do even the best budget models sound miles better than the most premium phones – to the point that they can justifiably feed high-end headphones or even a hi-fi system – but they can also hold thousands of albums of the highest recording quality.
In a bid to remain relevant in this feature-competitive world, most now offer wi-fi and built-in access to music streaming service apps like Tidal and Spotify”.
For The Guardian, Alan Martin tested the best MP3 players. Maybe this isn’t the sign that all portable physical devices are coming back. However, it is notable that MP3 players are back in the spotlight at a time when many are turning away from listening to music on their phones. Even if the music being played is digital, the fact that people want to buy a device and spend that money is encouraging:
“An MP3 player? In 2025? Am I going to be covering Betamax and MiniDisc players next?
No, this isn’t a retro piece from the Filter. You may be reading this at least three years after Apple decided the iPod business was too niche to be worth bothering with, but MP3 players – or digital audio players, as they should more accurately be called – are seeing a small resurgence, despite the domination of Spotify, Apple Music and the like.
“In the past few years, since Covid, we’ve seen way more people looking to get a new MP3 player,” says Chris Laidler, office manager of Advanced MP3 Players, an Edinburgh store specialising in audio equipment.
The reasons are, essentially, threefold. First, there’s the pleasure of using something tangible: a nostalgia for devices with a single purpose, devoid of notifications and apps. More importantly, though, there’s a desire to have a music collection again – something led by the music-loving algorithm in your brain, rather than one outsourced to technology. “It’s their collection, rather than a playlist they’ve subscribed to,” says Laidler, and they own the music and aren’t simply “leasing it from Spotify”.
I sourced 15 modern MP3 players from the likes of Sony, Agptek, Majority, Shanling, iBasso and FiiO – which may not all sound that familiar, such is the niche we’re dealing with. While players can go for more than £1,000, I was keen to test mainstream devices, with the highest priced at £649 and the lowest at £30.
I supplemented this with two old Apple models via Backmarket, where preowned tech can get a second life rather than becoming e-waste. Neither made the list, however, for reasons I’ll get to later.
I listened to a lot of music in different environments. I became familiar with my old collection (out and about, and while connected directly to my Cambridge Audio AXA25 hifi). To get the most out of the high-end players, I borrowed a couple of high-end FiiO headsets from Advanced MP3 Players: the FH75 wired in-ear monitors, and the over-ear FT7 headphones. These offered a considerable improvement over my own somewhat tired headphones.
IN THIS PHOTO: The Activo P1/PHOTO CREDIT: Alan Martin/The Guardian
All the while, I diligently made mental notes about the look, feel, battery life and usability of each device, relative to its cost. File quality is also a factor, of course, and to that end, I not only played MP3s, but lossless Flac versions of the same track.
If you’ve done enough reading on the topic of digital audio players, you’ll have undoubtedly come across the Astell & Kern brand … and then possibly realised its products are out of your price range. Enter Activo: a sub-brand from the company, which promises to deliver a lot of what audiophiles want for considerably less cost.
Why we love it
While £399 represents a significant outlay, it’s nowhere near as pricey as some models and still offers a lot of bang for your buck. The dual-DAC structure provides high-resolution audio, aided by its Digital Audio Remaster upsampling tech, plenty of pre-programmed filters and a built-in EQ to modify 20 frequencies to your tastes.
File support is strong, and it has 3.5mm and 4.4mm balanced audio ports for wired connections, along with Bluetooth 5.3 for wireless playback. It can even work as an external DAC for your computer if you like.
It comes with 64GB of internal storage, and you can expand it with microSD cards of up to 1.5TB. It uses Android – which I always worry detracts from the point of a dedicated MP3 player – but it’s a highly pared-back version focused on music. The Google Play Store is here, but it’s really only present to allow you to install Spotify, Tidal or whatever your streaming poison is. It’s intuitive, smooth enough, and not trying to mimic your phone: you won’t find yourself distracted by social media nonsense.
It’s a shame that … it doesn’t have more dedicated physical playback buttons. That and its chunky size almost made me give the cheaper £346.80 Sony NW-A306 the nod, but Activo’s smoother, pared-back version of Android and additional 4.4mm output gave it the edge”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Dalila Dalprat/Pexels
This isn’t an isolated thing. Many younger people are ditching their smartphones for something more basic. Going back to older phones. Buying digital cameras and relying less on their phones. That is a positive move. Part of this is the resurgence of the MP3 player. This feature highlights how the reliance on smartphones is like an addition. This move back to the physical, or at least older devices and technology, is a healthy thing. Maybe a sign of things to come:
“Why isn’t ‘Do Not Disturb’ enough?
The addictive nature of both social media and the phones we use to access social media is real. “Smartphones have the same chemical reaction in the brain as drugs and alcohol,” Melissa DiMartino, associate professor of psychology at New York Institute of Technology, tells Yahoo Life. “Getting ‘likes,’ messages and notifications from your phone releases dopamine, which makes us feel good. And, in turn, we want to repeat these feel-good behaviors.”
Looking at your phone to feel better becomes an addictive cycle that ultimately leads people to feel depressed and lonely when they aren’t getting those alerts, explains DiMartino. Increased anxiety and stress can also result from the continuous stream of updates and constant connectivity.
Once you open that phone, it’s like you just opened up Pandora’s box.
Ari Lightman, digital media and marketing professor
Interacting with a phone’s more standard operations, like calls and messages, is just a part of the sequence. “Once you open that phone, it’s like you just opened up Pandora’s box,” says Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. He tells Yahoo Life that just checking the weather can entice a person to click on the app that sits right next to it, whether it is LinkedIn or Instagram. “Then there’s a sort of cascading series of actions that basically snap up all your time, even in ‘Do Not Disturb,’” he says.
Deleting apps is not a solution, because “there’s always a replacement,” says Lightman.
What do MP3 players and digital cameras have to do with it?
The use of dumb phones has ushered in the need for other legacy technology. Caleb’s Nokia flip phone, for example, is limited to playing FM radio, which influenced his decision to use a separate MP3 player to access his personal collection of music.
Some others, like 32-year-old Alex Biniaz-Harris, haven’t made the switch to dumb phones but use other technologies for listening to music or taking pictures, so that they can avoid getting sucked into more screen time. Biniaz-Harris tells Yahoo Life that he opts to bring his iPod on drives, while leaving his phone behind, so he can listen to music without the added distractions of his iPhone. Having more limited options than Spotify makes the experience more intentional and even nostalgic, he says.
IMAGE CREDIT: Yahoo News (photos from Getty Images)
Using a device with limited functionality ... can be a welcome escape from the pressures of constant connectivity.
Riani Kenyon, anthropologist and behavioral analyst
Nostalgia plays a key role in the switch to legacy technology among young people, says Riani Kenyon, an anthropologist and behavioral analyst at the consumer insights agency Canvas8. “Despite not having firsthand experience of the 1990s or early 2000s, Gen Z expresses a strong affinity for the era’s tangible, straightforward technology,” she tells Yahoo Life. “For many, using a device with limited functionality, one that prioritizes calls and texts over endless notifications, can be a welcome escape from the pressures of constant connectivity.”
The deliberate use of these tools for specific purposes enables “greater levels of concentration and autonomy of thought,” says Lightman, whereas an iPhone tends to require attention on everything at once.
Digital minimalism is a lifestyle choice
While taking time away from your smartphone might not seem like a big deal, committing to a life where you use your device either more intentionally or not at all is difficult in today’s interconnected world. “The convenience of modern smartphones, which consolidate navigation, communication and entertainment into a single device, is difficult to replicate with older technology,” says Kenyon”.
Cost is an issue when it comes to devices. You have to invest in something additional to your smartphone. For music listening, it is clear that MP3 players off a benefit of being digital and also physical. Excellent playback quality and plenty of options – if you shop around and do your research -, is this going to be a movement that sees people buy C.D. playing devices and something to play cassettes in? There are modern-day equivalents of the Walkman, and I have covered this before. Whilst that will not be as notable as the rise of the MP3 player, it is clear that many do not want to rely on their phone and want to detach. Play music without being sucked into their smartphones. In addition to the quality of what we hear, MP3 players and other devices allow us to focus on music and not be distracted by other functions on the phone. Rather than being drenched in nostalgia, it is a way of being able to listen to music portably and get that quality but also not have to do everything on a smartphone. Something that can be additive and damaging. For that reason, the new surge in interest in MP3 players is good…
PHOTO CREDIT: Karolina Grabowska
FOR all of us.