In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.

If you are interested in standalone digital audio players (DAPs), I just recently bought this:

https://www.fiio.com/echomini

For ~$60 you get a device that can play every type of audio file and has better sound quality than your cellphone + streamer combo.

I've been reading more about Chinese hardware and if you've been sleeping on it there are a lot of great Chinese consumer products that are both extremely high quality + very cheap.

Turns out when you have tens of millions of engineers they pump out banger after banger. Also always hilarious, in an enduring way, finding the factory engineers engaging with consumers on random forums that take their feedback seriously.

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InitialLastName 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Note that in this case, you are getting what you pay for: I had a FIIO DAC that sounded amazing but was really bad about full-scale turn-on, sync and desync pops to the extent that it damaged my speakers. Yes, perfect power sequence hygiene would have prevented the problem, but one can't always be ready with the amplifier volume knob when their playback system crashes.

	▲	shimman 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		ah good to know. Outside of having a very basic dac for my cans on my desktop, I wouldn't think of any serious equipment failures could happen. Probably wrong to assume that these things are engineered to be safe/redundant. This is going to be my first DAP in like 15 years, zune being the last one I had. Pretty excited to rock it out for a bit. There's a current fad out there to move to more single-service type of devices rather than using a phone for everything. Want to try it out myself to be more intentional with my digital actions and ween myself away from corporate social media.

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jjgreen 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Woah, skeuomorphism writ large!

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rtkwe 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If they're allowed and help where phones wouldn't or don't there are still lots of options for stand alone MP3 players with minimal or no connectivity. They still exist as a market because they're dirt cheap to make.