HIFI WALKERH2 MP3 Player – High Res Audio DAP with Bluetooth5.2, Lossless Music Player, DSD DAC Support, Portable FLAC Player with Line Out, 64GB Memory Card, Expandable to 256GB

For around £100 or so this player has very high quality sound, and fantastic build quality. I have a Sony NW-A105, and imho this sounds a purer higher definition sound. The Sony has terrible battery life (android) and horrible eye burning screen, and the DSP effects mostly sound like an echo chamber. These however have a cheap TN screen but it’s serviceable and clear, the OS is easy to get used to and the physical controls work well with 1 hand. There are a few missing features that you would expect for a higher priced player, but all essentials are there. The equaliser seems best turned off, with a pure Hi-Def sound, when used it seems to filter each frequency band rather than boost. But as the sound is so sharp and clear already I can see why it works this way. Bluetooth could be an issue, as the sound is very low. So if you can’t adjust the sound on say Bluetooth headphones you are stuck if it sounds low. Using a speaker you can turn up the volume on the speaker. However tbh wired will always sound better than wireless, otherwise why would you listen to lossless audio on very lossy, low bit rate/bandwidth Bluetooth. Overall it can’t compete with the expensive audiophile brands, but it’s not supposed to. If you’re looking for a cheap lossless player I think this is unbeatable. Crystal clear, pin sharp sound. Nicely made with a nice metal shell (Sony is cheap & nasty plastic), and the preferable physical buttons. I can think of a lot worse to spend £100 on, especially in todays money crisis. 5*

Well it comes nicely presented in a nice box and feels well made, apparently metal and glass , chunky and weighty in a reassuring way. . Its easy to set up , the folders and no nonsense settings are easy to navigate and make sense out of.I put wav. files on straight from C.D. and was immediately impressed by the sound quality, this unit is so good at revealing details in the music, its a pleasure to listen to even through my cheap JVC lightweight flat earphones. Battery life seems fine there seems plenty of life in it after 12 hours play time.The downside has already been highlighted in other reviews . The unit goes into a sort of lockdown after a few seconds as the music plays, no doubt to prevent accidentally altering the settings. This means all buttons including volume and track selection are unavailable until the power button is briefly pressed. No big deal in itself ,but out walking/ working out this is inconvenient , the only way to alter the volume or skip a track is to "wake" the unit up again, not easily done with hand in pocket, in reality it usually means taking the unit out and studying the screen again.If you enjoy selecting a favourite album ,and letting it play through then this unit is a treat, you will enjoy the immersive good quality listening experience on offer here. However if you like to jump about preferring to repeat or skip songs or move to a different albums, then this is probably not for you, I imagine frustrating experience.For me its worth it. Sounds great, and is an excuse to enjoy a complete album on my walk .Four and a half stars

This audio player is well presented, well made and has good sound, although operating it takes some learning. The instructions are useful and the feature of a separate card to store music is very convenient, just copy files over from your PC. Sound seems a bit low to start with but can be tweaked, for example going to 'settings' and setting the gain to 'high' is a big improvement, although I haven't got into the equaliser settings yet. It sounds good played through a small headphone valve amp. I bought it to replace my ageing but faithful Sony Walkman player!

I bought this as my old iPod Classic has become increasingly temperamental and I read some generally positive reviews. I’ll also make the point that I’m old school in listening to music, usually preferring to play an album all the way through.Firstly, the basics of the HiFi Walker are quite good. Its build seems solid – more so than an iPod – sound quality with decent spec, connected in-ear listeners is up to scratch, the navigation fairly intuitive and it works fine when connected to another device with speakers. Also, its big advantage over an iPod is that you can just connect it to a computer then drag and drop music folders onto the SD card; much better than messing about with iTunes. Also, the ability to take up to 256GB is a big plus if you have a lot of music.But there is a significant fault. The machine has a function to search for music by category, which is meant to react to the metadata on the files – ie genre, artist, album artist, composer – but it doesn’t work. I’ve been in touch with the manufacturer’s customer service team about the problem but they have been unable to resolve it. Even though I’ve ensured the files have the metadata attached – using MP3 Tag software – it fails to read them and shows a line of zeros. The only category that does work is the ‘favourites’, which is created on the device itself.It is possible to get around this if, like me, you tend to take one approach to searching for music, as you can build it into the file structure on the SD card. So I tend to drop albums into a folder for that artist which then goes into another for the relevant genre. But if you want to take different approaches to the search at different times you can’t do so.Also, there’s a quirk that I find irritating, in that once an album is played it quickly moves onto the next track in the file structure, which means another album. Maybe not a big issue, but I like to have a pause once an album is finished (probably because I listen to a lot of classical and jazz).On top of this, it’s not completely clear what some of the settings are meant to do, and the manual doesn’t make it clear for every function.Overall it’s a decent device and I expect it would be OK for a lot of users, but there are clearly manufacturing faults and I wouldn’t go as far as recommending it.An update on this - After a few months use I discovered this runs on an older version of Bluetooth that doesn't connect with all receiving devices. If I could I would remove one of the three stars.