This article contains affiliate links, we will receive a commission on any sales we generate from it.Learn more Listening to music in 2025 usually means subscribing to a streaming service such as Spotify or Apple Music.The days of paying £10 or more for albums on vinyl records, tape cassettes or CDs seems long gone for most of us as millions have flocked to the convenience and affordability of paying a little more than that per month for a connected service that puts the history of recorded popular music at your fingertips.As a lover and consumer of music, this for many years has felt to me like a godsend.
I am aware it actively hurts the musicians but as a fan, it’s amazing that I can play Spotify each month and listen to Led Zeppelin’s back catalogue, find obscure Fiona Apple b-sides and even hit play on brand new releases the very day they are released for no additional fee.But I have noticed this immediate and easy access to Every Song Ever has had an adverse effect on my musical discovery and enjoyment.I spent my teenage years saving up paper round money to head to my local music shop every Monday to buy an album often based entirely on the cover art.This is how I discovered music that has shaped my tastes, from finding Nirvana’s In Utero to The Black Key’s Magic Potion via Manic Street Preacher’s The Holy Bible.Along with obsessively reading the NME, music was a mysterious world to discover.
All you had to do was make the effort - and spend some money.Nowadays, Spotify is relatively affordable but has destroyed my curiosity with its algorithmic playlists, Smart Shuffle suggestions and curated home page that either push me to music I don’t like or music I know like the back of my hand.There must surely be another way to recapture the joy of music without reverting back to buying vinyl records.
Though I love collecting them, their price has increased in recent years to the point of making collecting unviable for me, and they no longer come with free download codes for the digital copy.So, a couple of years ago, I bought a Sony Walkman.Not one that plays tapes or CDs, but a digital music player.Sony still makes these MP3-playing touchscreen devices that should be thought of as a modern iPod Touch.
The one I bought, the NW-A55, is solely for music files.This means you can only load bought music onto it via a cable just like we used to do in 2005.I persevered and found a lot of contentment in carrying around a dedicated audio player, buying copies of treasured albums to listen to in high-resolution (Hi-Res) formats such as WAV and FLAC that sound amazing through decent headphones.As you can tell from the faff and acronyms, this proved a bit of a rabbit hole.
Hi-Res albums can also get expensive, from about £8 up to £25 in my experience.But it turns out there could be a perfect halfway house.A newer Sony Walkman to mine that I tested, the Walkman NW-A306, is similar but runs on Android and can download apps like a smartphone.
That means you can get specialist audio apps such as Tidal or my preferred Qobuz and stream Hi-Res music over Wi-Fi.Qobuz, which costs from £12.99 per month, also lets you download tracks for offline listening, and I’m a big fan.I bought some cheap IEMs - that’s in-ear monitors, earphones that musicians use to record or hear their band when playing live and offer excellent audio quality - and set to it.Having your own chosen songs at your fingertips in amazing quality really spoke to me, and I was again enjoying music as an intentional pursuit rather than the homogenous habit of looping my On Repeat playlist on Spotify.A decent upgrade on the ones I got from Amazon are the Meze Audio Alba, a fine £149 set of IEMs.
A theme of my testing, the 'phones represent excellent value for money, with all Hi-Res devices I tried them with driving well balanced and expansive audio with a tangle-free cable and 3.5mm jack, plus an included USB-C dongle if you want to use them with your smartphone. A big name in the Hi-Res scene is Astell & Kern, a firm that sells dedicated DAPs (digital audio players) .The catch is they cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds, including the £799 SR35 I tried out.It sounded superb but has a chunky design and weirdly angled screen that makes it hard to use.I prefer the Activo P1 from its Activo sub-brand that costs £399.
It’s an excellent entry-level DAP with (slightly sluggish) Android software and great sound quality.I tested its chops with the over-ear £139 FiiO FT1 headphones that plug in via the headphone jack - Bluetooth is generally frowned upon for Hi-Res as it can never match the audio quality of a wired connection.That said, FiiO’s BT11 tries to get around this.It’s a USB-C dongle that plugs into a phone and can broadcast Hi-Res wirelessly at better frequencies.
I tested it with both iPhone and Android and while tunes sound good in the Bose QuietComfort Ultra Headphones, there’s still a distortion and hiss you just don’t get on wired alternatives. The best audio quality I found while testing was running offline files through my Sony Walkman or the Activo P1 and using the FiiO FT1 headphones.Without the need for streaming, the combination of Hi-Res file playing off a hard drive (or microSD card) straight into quality affordable headphones that massively undercut wireless over-ear cans in price.Sony and Bose have this market sewn up for the large part, and their £300+ prices are about justified with the presence of spatial audio and noise cancellation.
But for pure musical enjoyment, the FT1 is a bargain.I’ve heard details in songs I know well that I didn’t know were there before, and the whole setup makes me want to settle into an album and really listen to it.When did you last do that? I’m tired of music being the thing I listen to when I’m running around Lidl.Where did my passion for it go? It excites me that a small spend on new tech could help reshape my relationship with music.I’ve heard details in songs I know well that I didn’t know were there before, and the whole setup makes me want to settle into an album and really listen to it.The spend on the Activo P1 plus the FT1 is £538, so perhaps not a small amount for something you might think your smartphone and earbuds give you already.
But the sheer enjoyment I’ve got out of streaming Hi-Res music makes me want to take the plunge.If money were no object, I’d be paying for Hi-Res albums and cruising Qobuz’s download store with my credit card at the ready.But if this all sounds like too much, consider Hi-Res certified smartphones and earbuds.For example, the OnePlus 13 can play aptX Adaptive, one of the best quality wireless standards.
Connected to the excellent Nothing Ear (a) and streaming Qobuz instead of Spotify makes for a big bump in audio quality without such a commitment to a whole new way of listening.If you take a little step back from your listening habits and break free of streaming stagnation, you might just hear the music again.
