Portable WAV device?

[Grim Lounge Cowboy]

When cooking/cleaning/etc. background music is often from my Marshall Hanwell speaker. The relevant device being a chazzer-sourced CD player or an old ipod.

The CD player is getting a bit fitful. The ipod battery is shot, but still good enough. However, I am increasingly aware that the ipod sound isn't great.

WAV players are getting better and cheaper - yes? If so, is now the time to buy? Any thoughts?

[bionic boy]

I've got a Sony Walkman NW-A45 which plays WAV, FLAC etc. I had the more basic one for a while and then went for one with a touch screen. I rip all my vinyl to FLAC and listen on this- it has a micro SD card too so with a 400GB card it keeps me entertained for a long time.

[Turboellis]

For the last 3 years or so I've been using a very cheap music player, the A02 AGPtEK Lossless audio MP3 player with default 8 GB capacity storage, Micro SD card supports up to 64 GB
by AGPTEK. Costs about 20 quid. It plays wavs but I mainly do as bionic boy does and rip my vinyl to flacs and play those. It doesn't have a fancy touch screen but it does the job and when I have my JBL headphones attached it sounds great. I've also DJ-ed with 2 of them. No problem there either.

[Shere Khan]

For the last 3 years or so I've been using a very cheap music player, the A02 AGPtEK Lossless audio MP3 player with default 8 GB capacity storage, Micro SD card supports up to 64 GB
by AGPTEK. Costs about 20 quid. It plays wavs but I mainly do as bionic boy does and rip my vinyl to flacs and play those. It doesn't have a fancy touch screen but it does the job and when I have my JBL headphones attached it sounds great. I've also DJ-ed with 2 of them. No problem there either.

I love all this tech talk. I haven't got a clue what anyone is saying but I love it just the same. What's a flac?

[Milesago]

I have a Sony MP3 player which is excellent quality, good firmware, easy to navigate, etc, While I can't remember the specs or what other audio formats it supports, what I do remember is it has a volume limiting function which automatically lowers the volume (while playing a series of loud warning beeps) when it decides you've been listening at too high a volume for too long. It's like having your nan sit beside you all the time you're listening to music. If I'd known about this, I probably wouldn't have bought it. There is no workaround. I contacted Sony and they said it was EU law... in fact it was their overzealous response to some EU guideline. I don't recall the details, as this all happened a few years ago. In any case, if you're considering a Sony model, check it does not have this big brother function.

[Turboellis]

I love all this tech talk. I haven't got a clue what anyone is saying but I love it just the same. What's a flac?

FLAC is an open standard audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio. So the file sizes are smaller than wavs or aiffs (about a half ) but the quality is the same. (MP3 loses quality, and .m4a is Apple's proprietary lossless format and I don't want to be locked into the Apple universe)

When I rip LPs in Audacity, that uses a different format, so I export to flac to retain the quality and keep the file sizes a bit smaller.

[Grim Lounge Cowboy]

Worth knowing the Flac distinction. Storage hasn’t been a constraint for me. Since I started looking a little while back price was a concern. The Sony kit looks good, but doesn’t strike me as a budget option. 20 quid certainly does.

[jay]

If you're confident enough or know someone with some technical chops.
An option could be get a raspberry pi, setup one of the HiFi operating systems on it. Then you can stream stuff to it, think from your (if you have one) smartphone.
Ive seen a few setups like this, quite cool, fairly futureproof and not too expensive.

oops. Missed the need for portability

[Shere Khan]

FLAC is an open standard audio coding format for lossless compression of digital audio. So the file sizes are smaller than wavs or aiffs (about a half ) but the quality is the same. (MP3 loses quality, and .m4a is Apple's proprietary lossless format and I don't want to be locked into the Apple universe)

When I rip LPs in Audacity, that uses a different format, so I export to flac to retain the quality and keep the file sizes a bit smaller.

I see. If I ever download anything I use WAV but you're saying FLAC is the same but smaller. What is the selling point of a WAV, then?

[Milesago]

Flac files tend to be larger than mp3 files, but are lossless.

[SirSlim]

Flac files tend to be larger than mp3 files, but are lossless.

In this day and age when storage drives are so cheap it doesn't make too much difference to record as FLAC rather than WAV and as Fuz has found to his cost - it is much easier to make Audio CDs if you have your files as WAVs

I have the Sony NWZA-15 which I got a few years ago - plays all the high resolution formats - sounds great. Used it to "DJ" my road's street party last summer and it sounded like Jah Shaka through the half decent PA that we had available..

[Milesago]

If you're looking to spend around 20 quid, then AGPTEK is probably the way to go. It in itself is not a "lossless audio player". Lossy vs lossless compression is a characteristic of the format used to store the audio data. The more data you store, the larger the file. The more formats supported by a player, the better.

Being able to expand a players memory with an SD card is very useful, and allows you to opt for larger FLAC versions of music rather than MP3, say, when you have the choice. However, what I've found since I bought my mp3 player is that audio format is determined by availability. I tend to download stuff from blogs and there the overwhelming majority of stuff is mp3. I do not use subscription sites or things like spotify (about which I know very little).

[Xann]

I'd just buy a phone that could do it tbh.

http://powerampapp.com/

[Grim Lounge Cowboy]

I started reading something about how with a few bolt-ons the iphone (a cast-off from my life partner/significant other) will play WAVs. I couldn't follow it.

20 quid was much cheaper than I had expected.

A couple of sites seem to be talking up the cheaper FiiO devices.