Sony NW-A306

Verdict

A solid portable music player, but the Sony NW-A306 can’t quite escape the feeling that it could have been better. Its pocketable size is appreciated and the audio performance is good, but there are times where it tries to be too much like a smartphone.

Introduction

It’s been 35 years since the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, which changed portable listening forever, and the NW-A306 is one of the latest additions to the Walkman’s long lineage.

A lot has changed since the iPhone emerged, though if you’re a music lover you’ll always want a dedicated player that isn’t compromised in the ways a smartphone is.

While the Walkman isn’t as popular as it was, it still has plenty to offer, though the influence of smartphones seems to have put the NW-A306 into an awkward position.

Design

• Compact size
• Well built
• Touch screen and physical buttons

Sony describes the NW-A306 as compact and, even compared to the very portable Astell & Kern SR35, the Sony is smaller still with a depth of 11.8mm, a height of 98.4mm and weighing 113g. It could easily slip into your pocket along with whatever else is in there.

The aesthetic matches the NW-A55L I reviewed back in 2020 with buttons located on the right-hand side – slightly small for someone with digits as big as mine, but easy enough to find. Feedback could be slightly better, and so could the responsiveness of presses. Hold the power button and that brings up a screen of options for either turning it off, restarting or taking screenshots.

The backside of the unit has a rippled wave design, which gives it a grippier surface to hold onto, while the screen is 3.6-inches in size with a 720p resolution. The display is unremarkable: detail, sharpness and colours are fine, but won’t grab your attention. Build quality is assured, as you’d expect from Sony.

The screen also supports touch gestures, so like an Android smartphone, you can swipe left to right; swipe down to see notifications or swipe up to see the library of apps on the device, and even drag and drop icons. In a nice nod to its past, you can go into the menu and set the screensaver to an image of the TPS-L2.

There’s the one 3.5mm socket, plus a USB-C input, and microSD slot. There are only two colours to choose from in black and blue, which is disappointing. From a sustainability perspective no plastics are included in the packaging.

Features

• Android 12 OS
• Wide file compatibility
• 32GB of storage

The Sony NW-A306 supports Android 13 and its implementation can be grating at times. It’s as if it tries too hard to act like a smartphone.

Logging into my Google account, I’m inundated with notifications once the A306 is powered up. It becomes rather distracting after a while.

And the player is none too intuitive or responsive in dismissing notifications. Trying to flick the screen up to see the ‘clear all’ is surprisingly tricky, but most of all, the interface can be very slow.

There’s lag with button presses and swipes across the screen with telltale stutter. Powering up the NW-A306 and waiting for the lock screen takes around 40 seconds, and loading an app to play music feels like it takes an age as well on top of that too.

There’s access to Google Play store and other Google apps, but like with the FiiO players, I wonder how useful it is to have those apps in the first place? I’m not going to use Gmail on the Sony NW-A306 over my smartphone.

You can download all the music apps you need like Deezer, Tidal, Apple Music, Spotify, Amazon Music, and Qobuz. You can also download the Booking.com app if you fancy that too. This is another aspect where the Google integration feels excessive for this particular device.

File playback includes DSD, MP3, FLAC, AAC, Apple Lossless, AIFF, APE, WMV, WMA, and MQA; though there’s a limit, as the Sony couldn’t play a 24-bit WMA file. Bluetooth 5.0 support covers SBC, AAC, aptX HD and LDAC streaming. You also get Sony’s 360 Reality Audio playback with compatible services.

Storage is just 32GB (18GB in reality). That doesn’t leave much if you’ve got big files. This can be bypassed with a microSD, and the NW-A306 accepts up to 2TB but the card has to be formatted with the player before it can be used. That’s annoying if you’ve got a card full of music ready to go.

Sony offers a few different figures on battery life depending on the files you’re playing. 44.1Hz FLAC takes up 36 hours and 96kHz FLAC files equals 32 hours, while streaming is said to take up 26 hours. Having played a mixture of FLAC and MP3 files for about two hours at 60% volume, the Sony NW-A306 fell to 93%, which would be around 33 hours in total. It’s in the ballpark for what Sony’s A306 can achieve.

Performance

• Two EQ modes
• Detailed, clear sound
• Not the biggest bass

There are two ways of approaching the Sony NW-A306’s audio performance. One with the ClearAudio+ filter on, and the other with it off. I’ll start first with the EQ feature off.

Partnered with a pair of Austrian Audio Hi-X65 headphones, the Sony goes for a smooth, clear description on Four Non-Blondes What’s Going On, with decent levels of detail in describing the instruments. With Benjamin Clementine’s London, I like the focus and clarity directed to his vocals, but the smoothness of the A306’s tone means that cymbal crashes don’t register with as much crispness.

It doesn’t summon a particularly big bass performance with Kid Cudi’s Often I Have These Dreams. It’s a track that could benefit from more power, slam, and bass extension that the NW-A306 can’t or isn’t interested in providing. High frequencies aren’t the brightest, but they do come through with clarity. Overall it adds to a clear, if slightly cautious, performance.

With ClearAudio+ disabled, the Sony goes for a neutral, delicate, and flat performance. Bass sounds reserved, there’s not much dynamism either on a small or larger scale, resembling flat ground rather than mountainous peaks. In its default mode the A306 isn’t adding much to the signal, but in doing so it lacks a little flavour and pomp.

Switch the ClearAudio+ EQ on and it generates a little more force and energy with the low frequencies, although bass still isn’t as big or as powerful as I’d like. It does sound bigger, larger and reaches a little further with ClearAudio+ on than without.

There’s a warmer tone with ClearAudio+ on and vocals have a bigger focus. Gregory Porter’s vocals in Concorde have greater presence, his singing infused with more energy and there’s more dynamism evident. There’s a more confident sense of expression than there was without ClearAudio+ on, and it makes for a more engaging listen.

Turning ClearAudio+ off and music is flatter and lacks depth, but it does sound a little more defined and clearer. The energy, expression, increased width of the soundstage and better sense of depth with the ClearAudio+ filter on makes me wonder why it’s not on by default. At the very least I’d recommend switching between ClearAudio+ toggled on and off and seeing what you think. To me, the benefits of having it on are greater than leaving it off.

You could also use the Sony NW-A306 as a DAC to boost songs on your PC or Mac. While it’s an improvement on plugging your headphones in directly, when comparing Isfar Sarabski’s Planet album in a WMV file on my laptop with a streaming version on Qobuz on the A306, I was expecting to hear a performance jump but couldn’t hear much of a difference. Given one is a high quality file and the other is a stream, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or not.

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