The 5 Best MP3 Players to Buy in 2023 | Esquire UK

So, you’ve decided to invest in a quality MP3 player. Here’s what you need to know:

Portability: The majority of our favourite digital audio players aren’t designed to be taken outdoors. In particular, the Astell and Kern models are luxury devices that will turn heads when sitting on a coffee table and aren’t intended to be able to withstand rain or other outside elements. If you’re planning on taking your player to the gym or on a flight, go for a more affordable device so it’s less of an issue if it suffers a few bumps while it’s in a bag or slipped into your pocket.

Display: For seeing album artwork, browsing the menus, changing equaliser settings, or flicking between tracks, you’ll want your audio player to have a screen. Every model on our list has one, although not all are touch displays.

Operating system: The majority of the MP3 players on our list run using Google’s Android operating system. As the OS is open-source – meaning any company can base their software on it – some, including the high-end Astell and Kern models, use their own Android version that’s been customised.

Storage: How many tracks do you want to hold? We reckon the answer is “as much as possible” so pay attention to the built-in storage (measured in gigabytes, or GB) and check if it takes an SD card. That lets you add even more capacity by popping it into a port on the device. High-resolution files take up more room than standard MP3s (a song in the high-quality FLAC format is around 15-20 MB compared to around 3-5 MB for a standard MP3). Generally, more storage is always better.

Audio files: That brings us to the files you’ll be listening to. We’ll not bore you with bit depth and sampling rates (although if you’re intrigued, check out this ), so here are the basics. In short, high-resolution audio files are larger in size and “lossless”, meaning they have sound that’s better than CD quality, and pack in more details from the original recording processes. In comparison, files such as MP3 or AAC are known as “lossy” and theoretically don’t sound as good because they’re compressed. You lose some of the finer details in your music, but the sizes are much smaller so they’re better for storing on phones or tablets. Common high-resolution (or “hi-res”) files include FLAC, WAV and ALAC, while non-hi-res formats include MP3 and AAC. Honestly, we admit that it can be hard to tell the difference unless you have well-trained ears and an audiophile-level headphone setup.

Battery life: All the models on our list give you at least 10 hours of listening time. The rule here is the same as with storage capacity: more battery life is always better.

Connectivity: You’ll always want to check the port selection of your digital audio or MP3 player. All our favourite models have a trusty 3.5mm headphone jack so you connect a quality set of wired headphones. Some players also have slots for SD cards for you to add audio files, or wifi for accessing some streaming apps like Spotify or Tidal. With the exception of the budget Sony NW-E394, all the models on our list charge via USB-C.