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[Mr Swordfish]

Looking at the Sony NW-A306 Walkman A Series to pair with Media Center.

Opinions?

Also, would it make sense to use the JRiver for Android instead of whatever Sony has pre-installed?

Thanks.

[JimH]

Nice to see that Sony still calls them MP3 players.   https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/c/walkman-mp3-players

Your existing phone may be enough.  What would you like to do?

Take a quick look at the Remotes topic on our wiki so you know what can be done now.

[Mr Swordfish]

Nice to see that Sony still calls them MP3 players.   https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders/c/walkman-mp3-players

Your existing phone may be enough.  What would you like to do?

Take a quick look at the Remotes topic on our wiki so you know what can be done now.

My phone is definitely not enough.  The way I use it (car, ski condo) I want a dedicated device.  One with lots of storage (the Sony has an SD card slot that supports 2TB)  My library doesn't fit on my iPod classic with 160GB, so I want something bigger.

To elaborate:  I have a second home about 4 hours away from my primary residence.  I use the music player for the drive and when at the other place.  I also go on long car trips elsewhere but I don't carry it around otherwise so a dedicated player makes the most sense to me.  And if I get a phone call or a text I don't want that interfering with the music. 

I'm sure there are cheaper devices out there, but $350 is not that much in the greater scheme of things.  If I was still working in pro audio I'd pony up the additional $500 for balanced outputs, but I don't have a use for that anymore.

Open to other suggestions...

[Mr Swordfish]

Bought the Nw-A306 and I really wouldn't recommend it.

It doesn't seem to play nicely with other software, and if you contact Sony support they just want you to use their produce (Music Center).  I can't get JRiver for Android to work on it at all, and the Rocket Player is problematic.  I've been using the Sony player that comes with it, but there's a major problem:

It only supports a handful of file formats. No Vorbus or Opus, and if you compare the list of formats supported by android and what's supported by the NW-A306 there are a lot of conspicuous absences:

https://helpguide.sony.net/dmp/1301/v1/en/contents/TP1000752534.html

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/platform/supported-formats



There are a number of other annoyances, such as you can't disable the screen timeout which makes for using it in the car dangerous. And every so often it stops playing and complains that the volume is too loud.  I suppose that's some kind of mandated safety feature in the EU, but it's very annoying to me since I use it as a line-level device instead of headphones and want it to output something close to -10 dbV.