Got this player last week, Asian version, also blue. Really like the blue color.
The good: it sounds really good. Like, the presentation is maybe not to everyone's taste (bass is more of a rumbly growl than a fast thud sometimes and the mids are warm) but overall good stage, separation, very good. I don't think I've heard better at this price, but I don't have too much portable experience and I end up comparing to desktop dac setups. Sony really nailed it; I don't know or care too much about the exact architecture of this thing but it is well built, well made, and at the thing it was designed to do, which is play music, it's in good to exceptional territory.
The bad is...
..well, it's Sony. They're like the H&K of electronics.
Fundamentally all they had to do to improve on the A55 was to make it sound better and do away with the proprietary connector. They _did_ do this. They however also did a bunch of other stuff that I am just mind boggled by. Sony seem either committed to the idea that they know what's best for the user or simply didn't think too much about the user experience.
For example, Android. The A105 features full fat, full version stock android with one or two tweaks. The music player is an app. I understand the decision to go for full Android - everyone's doing it these days, and the way people access their music with Tidal/Spotify meant that Sony must have thought Android was a must. However, in an amazing display of not really getting it, it feels incredibly crowbarred in. The A105 is tiny; bordering on cute. The screen is not large enough for the full Android experience. A customized version of software that takes into account what it's like to actually mess with a smartphone UI on a screen that's like a third the size of most major flagship phones today would have been very much appreciated. Second, many of the A105's post-processing, clear-audio, augmentations and hi-res upscaling to the sound straight up don't apply to using any other apps to play music. So playing Spotify or Tidal doesn't take advantage of any of the cool music features that Sony built into the thing. So why even have Android in the first place?
Another example is the battery. Android has so much stuff running in the background that the only way to really conserve battery is by turning on airplane mode. Which makes wifi/bluetooth and all the fun wireless connectivity and streaming things the player can do an exercise in puzzlement. You can do it, sure, but it will drastically run down the battery life. Which is again, acceptable for a smartphone, but the A105 is not a smartphone.
Notably, the A105 lacks QuickCharge. Think for a moment about what that means; for every 5 hours of playback from streaming or wi-fi you'll need to charge it for at least an hour and a half. My phone can get up to full charge from nothing inside of half that time. I'm not sure why this decision was made - either Sony don't want to license the technology or thought it was unneeded in a music player. But then again, why use Android at all if this is the case?
Even worse, using the player while charging it results in significant electrical noise that I can hear with a couple different IEMs. It's loud and obvious enough to be distracting. Okay, so sensitive IEMs aren't the way to go with this player, right?
But the A105 is hot garbage for driving anything that's at all thirsty. I kept wanting it to give more _more_. It wasn't that the sound was thin - in fact, the default presentation is a lush and warm sound, but I kept wanting _more_ from it when driving anything that wasn't an IEM. Jacking up the volume often simply raised the volume without adding the increase in texture that I was desperately missing when comparing it to desktop amps.
It's a very good portable player, and I will be keeping it. The build is impeccable, the size is just right, and it sounds great. But man alive, Sony are a company built entirely off the back of engineers, and it's almost fun to see how in 40 years Sony persist in thinking they know better than the consumer when it comes to consumer electronics. Sometimes it leads them to build great things, and the market understands it in due time. The rest of the time, it really makes me want to wonder - does Sony test their products for usability at all? In real world conditions, with people who aren't on the Sony payroll?
A hard reset instead of just putting it in standby.
