Sony Walkman NW A55 Review

Sony's NW-A55 might not seem like it would or should fit in with the likes of top-of-the-line players from FiiO or even Astell&Kern, but read out review to find out why we think it might be one of the best players out there.
Pros
  • Relatively compact design
  • Library management via PC
  • Easy interface
  • Bluetooth format compatibility
Cons
  • Some album art issues
  • Proprietary data port
  • Design feels perhaps a little dated
  • Some UI lag
Final Rating
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Rating Details
Bottom Line
If we look at the A55 purely based on the merits of a compact standalone portable player, and if that is all you need, then I honestly could not recommend or rate any other player higher than the A55.
Table of Contents

Specs

  • Display: 3.1-inch TFT, 800 x 480 resolution
  • Frequency Response: 20 – 40kHz
  • Output power: 35mW + 35mW @ 16-ohm
  • Battery-life: Up to 45hrs

Design

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Perhaps the first thing that will strike you about the A55 is just how familiar it looks, and that because Sony have been using what seems to be an almost identical design for the A40-series, as well as the A30-series which came before that.
It’s by no means a bad design, and maybe Sony is sticking to a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t wish there was a bit more of a modern flair in the design. The front is dominated by the 3.1-inch TFT display which has a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, which in turn gives us a nice crisp pixel density of 300ppi. If we look really closely we can see some slight pixilation, but from normal viewing angles and distances the text remains very sharp and legible.The only area where I’d say that the limitation of the display become far more obvious is when scrolling through the library and it shows the small album art images. But really, this isn’t something that bothers me.The left side houses the micro-SD card slot which is protected by a colour-matched flap. There is a small rubber gasket here, which should offer a reasonable amount of protection against dust, but this in no way shape or form means that the device has any sort of protection against water.Over on the right side are all the buttons which include a power button, a volume rocker, a play/pause and skip buttons, and finally a hold switch. This hold function is something we don’t really see very often, and what it allows you to do is to all forms of input apart from the power-button. This is rather useful if you use the device during activities and want to avoid any unintended button presses from interrupting your music.

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Along the bottom is an area to attach some form of a lanyard or wrist strap, the proprietary 22-pin WM-port and a 3.5mm single-ended headphone jack.
It’s a real pity to see Sony still clinging to this proprietary data port as it means connecting the A55 to other devices such as an external DAC device requires a very specific cable. FiiO does make such a cable but the other end is terminated with a micro-USB connection, so that limits you to using DACs that have micro-USB inputs, not Type-C, or even full-size USB connectors like those found on iFi’s Micro and Nano portable DACs. What really confuses me is that this proprietary connector would’ve made total sense if Sony had a whole bunch of accessories and docks that greatly extended the functionality of the device via this 22-pin port…but there are practically none.
If we think back to when the iPod, and especially the first few iPod Touches were the portable music players to have, there were tons and tons of options out there in the form of home entertainment systems and portable speakers that incorporated the proprietary Apple connector which then allowed you to dock the iPod into the device. But for Sony there seems to be hardly any at all.

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It also means that if you’re travelling for any extended amount of time, then you need to take your WM-port USB cable with to charge the device. Failing that, and depending on where you’re travelling to, you might have a hard time finding a shop that will stock these cables as they are nowhere near as widely available as a simple Micro or Type-C USB cable.
So, that’s just a little precaution to keep in mind. I think the last thing worth mentioning is that, if we look over on the rear, we’ll see an NFC logo. The nice thing here is that you can quickly and easily pair the A55 with another device over NFC such as your mobile phone or something from Sony like the WM-1000XM3 headphones. I don’t feel that this is a must-have feature, but a nice addition nonetheless.

User Interface

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Ok, so let’s delve into the UI for a bit.
Oddly enough, even though it might look pretty simplistic, there is actually a fair amount going on here.
On what is essentially the home screen we’ve got access to quite a number of functions.
Starting on the very top we’ve got indicators to show us if music is currently playing, the volume level, whether Bluetooth and NFC is on, as well as a battery indicator.

Just below these indicators we get our first row of icons. The first takes you to the FM radio player, but to use this you will need to connect your headphones directly to the audio jack as the cable acts as the antenna.
Next is a Language Study specifically intended for, well, language studying. Admittedly this is not a function I have used, so exactly how this works and how effective it works is not something I could honestly comment on.

The next icon is basically just a nice and easy shortcut to putting the A55 into DAC mode, which means that you can then connect it to your PC and then the A55 will act as your sound card.

The last icon is somewhat similar, but this is to put the device into Bluetooth receiver mode, meaning that you can use the A55 as a Bluetooth DAC, should you want to.

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Then we move on down to the main panel which allows you to browse your music library according to different criteria. You are able to select which items to show and which not by tapping on the little toolbox icon on the bottom-right, but we’ll take a look at this icon a bit later on.
The other thing you can do is to rearrange the order of the icons by simply tapping and holding on whichever one you want, and then just dragging it to a new location.
I’m not going to cover each category as most of them are pretty self-explanatory, but what you should notice is that, in order to make full use of some of these items you really need your music to be properly tagged, and that leads us to Sony’s Music Centre app which can be installed on your PC. For Mac users there is a Content Transfer for Mac app, and I did have a brief look at it, but since I don’t use a Mac I’m not in a position to say exactly how it compares to the PC version. But, for what it’s worth, it seemed to me that the Content Transfer app relies on iTunes for handling tags and album art. In contrast, the Music Centre app for PC is a complete standalone app, which you can use to fully organise your library in terms of creating playlists, and getting all of the right tags and album art.
Speaking of album art, here’s something I found a little annoying about the A55.
If we take players such as those from the likes of FiiO, iBasso, and Shanling (just to name a few), you can opt to have the album art embedded into the tags of each track, or you can simply place a single album art image into an album folder and then name it something like folder.jpg or cover.jpg, and then the player will automatically show that album art when a track within that folder is played.
However, things aren’t as simple with the Sony.
In this instance, the A55 doesn’t look for album art images within folders, the only way it seems to display album art is if the image is embedded into the tags. This posed 2 issues.

If you use file formats that don’t support embedded album art, well, then you’re a bit screwed there. I came across this issue because I recently decided to do a little battery-life test with different file formats on my Shanling M0, and I consistently found that I got longer battery-life when using the WAV format. In case you’re not familiar with this, WAV is essentially the raw digital audio format. If you’re using something like a FLAC file, what the player does is to essentially convert it to WAV on the fly before it gets converted into analogue audio. The advantage to storing your music in WAV then is that there is no need for the player to waste any processing power on that conversion, and so my best guess is that this is why I was seeing longer playback times. But there are also 2 downsides to the WAV format with the first being that it takes up significantly more storage space than FLAC, and the other downside is that tags aren’t as well supported as FLAC and MP3, for example.
So, getting back to my case, because my entire library was in WAV format and my album art images were placed in each album folder, none of the album art was being showed by the player. Ok, so after I did a little bit of digging online, it turned out that I would need to convert my library into FLAC, and then embed the album art into each track individually. This is where the second issue came in because as I was looking around on the interwebs I came across several posts that stated that these Sony players will only show the embedded album art if the JPEG image is saved in the baseline format, not progressive. This is something very important to keep in mind if you have to add any album art manually.
But now this brings us back to the Music Centre app. What I absolutely love about this is just how easy it makes library management. It will even automatically download any missing tag data as well as the correct album art images. So all I really had to do was convert my library to FLAC, and then import the new library into Music Centre and wait for about an hour or so while it filled in all the tags and the album art. There’s also another feature which I found quite interesting, which is called SensMe Channels.

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Essentially what this looks like to me is what Apple had on the early iPod Touches. Truth be told, the newer iPods might still have this, but it’s been well over a decade since I last used one.
What the iPod had was called Genius Playlist, and basically what it did was to automatically create a playlist based on certain criteria. With the Sony we’ve got this SensMe Channels which appears to work similarly.
As best I can tell it looks like the Music Centre app analyses the rhythm or tempo (or perhaps both) or something like that of each song, and then groups similar tracks into a playlist. We can see these on the A55 when we go into the SensMe Channels, and these playlists are called Energetic, Emotional, Lounge, Dance, Extreme, Upbeat, Relax, Mellow, Morning, Daytime, Evening, Night, and finally Midnight. I must admit that I found myself using this feature quite a couple of times, and for the most part it’s pretty accurate at keeping to the mood.

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So, jumping back to the home screen, below the music categories are some playback buttons that allow you to easily play/pause and skip tracks, then below this are some other shortcuts that allow you to jump to the now playing screen, or to access the settings of the device.

Under Settings are a few more options, such as adjusting the brightness, switching Bluetooth on and off, and then there was one feature I did look for but I couldn’t find anything relevant, and that has to do with gapless. But, whilst it seemed like there wasn’t any such feature that you can toggle manually, I did listened to a few live albums and I really could not detect any hiccups between tracks, so that’s great news as it seems gapless playback is essentially enabled by default.

Another section of the Settings I’m going to cover has to do with the sound, but before I can talk about this specific topic, let’s just generally take a look at the sound character first.

Sound

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Where other companies such as FiiO, Shanling, iBasso, Cayin, and even Astell&Kern, all rely on 3rd party DAC and amp chips form the likes of AKM, Sabre, and Texas Instruments, Sony tend to do their own thing.
As a result, the sound character I’m hearing from the A55 is a little different to what I’m used to. If I compare it to my Shanling M0, for example, the A55 seems a little warmer, softer and more forgiving relative to the M0. The M0 seems like it offers a more neutral character and that it is able to provide seemingly better instrument separation and definition. If I listen to drum hits in particular, the M0 has a bit more of an immediate snap, whereas the A55 tend to come across a bit more impactful. But the thing is, I really couldn’t tell you which one is the technically more correct one.
Honestly speaking, if I had to pick between these two, I’d pick the M0 on sound character alone.
Well, actually, to be totally honest, that’s what I would have done if I didn’t start messing around with the sound settings, and in particular I’m talking about the ClearAudio+ setting.

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Sony has outfitted the A55 with a fair number of sound effects, including one which they call Vinyl Processor which attempts to recreate the warm and rich sound usually associated with vinyl records. Then there’s also a VPT (Surround) effect which is an effect that gives you the perception of a much wider stereo image.
But, all of the effects, including the equalizer are disabled if you use the aforementioned ClearAudio+ effect.
What this effect does is pure magic…and I’m going to tell you upfront, this effect is entirely the reason why I’m going to tell you that the A55 is the best portable player I’ve ever used simply because it has allowed me to enjoy my music in a totally different way than what I am used to.
When I first tried out this effect I thought to myself “oh, hello, this is quite different”. And then I made the mistake of continuing to listen to a few more songs with it enabled. And then it happened, I turned the ClearAudio+ effect off.
I seriously could not believe how incredibly flat and boring music sounded without this effect. Like, how on Earth did I ever even remotely enjoy music without this in my life?
Ok, I know, that is quite an exaggeration, but that is honestly how I felt at the time. My HD58X just sounded so good and my music collection has never sounded better…for the most part.You see, what this ClearAudiio+ effect does is to widen the stereo image and apply what seemed to be a w-shaped equalisation curve.
Now, when I say that my music collection sounded great for the most part, the only area where I found this effect to interfere too much is when listening to a binaural album. Afterall, the entire point of a binaural recording is to give headphone users the most realistic stereo image, so by adding another layer of processing just messes around with it too much. But, for the rest of my music, this effect was damn near-perfect. It was almost perfect because I felt that it increased the bass just a little bit too much, but unfortunately you cannot edit this effect manually. This got me thinking though if I could perhaps recreate it with the other effects that are available in the settings. Maybe the ClearAudio+ was just somewhat of a preset. Thankfully, I think I figured it out.

With the help of a few frequency response measurements I eventually got an exact match of the ClearAudio+ effect when I use the Studio setting for the VPT (Surround) effect, enabled the DC Phase Linearizer, and setup a custom equalization curve of +6 at 60Hz, +3 at 1kHz, -3 at 6.3kHz, and another +6 at 16kHz.
This was a big step because now I could tweak the EQ curve to better suit my HD58X whilst still enjoying the bigger perceived stereo image provided by the VPT (Surround) setting.

Now, I know, from a standpoint of audio fidelity and converting the digital audio file in the most objectively purest analogue form possible, what I’m saying and doing here it totally sacrilegious. I get that, and I know I’m probably going to get flamed for this.

But I honestly do not care simply because this is the most enjoyable experience I’ve ever had with a portable audio product.
I think it comes down to the fact that these effects, and in particular the surround effect, has given me the closest reproduction in a portable product of what my full-size sound system sounds like.
Just having that perception of more space between myself and where the music is coming from made such a big impact in my overall enjoyment of listening to my music.
Switching back to my Shanling M0 or any other portable DAC device, to be honest, felt so different, and so disappointing, to the point where I almost wish that I had never experienced this little Sony player, because it pretty much ruined everything else for me.

Value

When it comes time to discuss the value of the A55 as a portable audio product, objectively it won’t score massive points simply because it does lack numerous features such as a proper analogue lineout, relatively low power output compared to similar offerings from FiiO and Shanling, as well as no WiFi and certainly no direct access to streaming apps.
But, if we look at it purely based on the merits of a compact standalone portable player, and if that is all you need, then I honestly could not recommend or rate any other player higher than the A55.
Given the easy-to-use UI navigation, the super long battery life, the fantastic media library management, and then the manner in which it portrays music (albeit with the aid of various DSP effects), then the A55 really is my personal favourite portable player to date.
What’s more, this device is being sold for around $220-$240 which makes it even easier to recommend is a fantastic value-packed device.
If you do live near a store that stocks the A55 and you’re able to demo it, I do recommend that you do so and check out that ClearAudio+ effect to see just what a difference it can make.