If you pair one of the devices in this buying guide with a set of the best headphones you’ve got the ultimate in premium, portable music: high-quality music that you can take on your travels. These days a small cheap player doesn’t need to mean a compromise in sound quality. The SanDisk Clip Sport offers decent sound quality and – as long as you don’t select Europe as your region – masses of volume.

Aside from the buttons, a lead hardware feature is the SanDisk Clip Sport’s screen. Some MP3 players at the price don’t have a screen at all. The MP3 player market is in such a diminished state that we’ve learnt not to expect much ‘innovation’ in new products, and you don’t find it here either. However, it’s a good budget alternative to an iPod shuffle. VerdictYou don’t have to listen long, hard, or through especially accomplished headphones to realise the M11S is the real deal. In every meaningful music-making respect, it has skills – and in some areas, it’s a genuine expert. There are also none of the neat extra bits you get in one of Apple’s players. The Clip Sport won’t work with earphone remote controls, it won’t remember where you were navigating in your music library should you leave the player for quite a while, and it won’t pause music when you unplug your earphones. The player is built with a full version of Android, complete with Wi-Fi connectivity and the Google Play Store, which results in it being kind of like an Android version of the iPod touch, able to do much more than just play music. However, the Onkyo DP-X1A is built for super-high-quality audio, and it's an absolute dream. It supports a range of music formats, including FLAC, OGG, WAV, MP3, ALAC, and more. In terms of hardware, the device has two chipsets, one to power the overall device, and one to handle the DAC and amplifier – resulting in a noise-free experience. You’re asked to select your region upon start-up, and if you select Europe the player is subjected to extremely aggressive volume limitating that effectively ruins the player with any earphones that are remotely hard to drive. We test dozens of hi-res portable music players every year at TechRadar, and that means we know exactly which features, specs, file support and wireless audio codecs to look out for.It's important for us to compare the performance of these players against the claims made by their manufacturers, which is why we take the time to make sure the stamina, durability, connectivity and sound quality claims are legit.

It’s a 1-inch 128 x 128 pixel LCD display. That’s slightly higher-res than the 96 x 96 pixel screen of the Clip Zip, but it’s still pretty low-res compared with today’s phones, and the 240 x 432 pixel screen of the iPod nano. As we saw with the Clip Sport’s build, it’s not quite Apple-grade. The panel quality is just OK, with pretty severe contrast shift should you turn the screen at the wrong angle.

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However, presentation of the mid-range is different. The Clip Sport has much more up-front, harder mids, making vocals sound closer to your ears. The softer, more diffuse mids of the iPod Classic are a little easier on the ear, and the Clip Sport can sound a little harsh at times. However, in pure sound quality terms they are roughly comparable – not great, but decent.