Choosing a player

A DAP (Digital Audio Player) can be a streaming audio player, a PC or a hard disk player (often called music server).

 

A couple of aspects to consider are:

 

• Silence.
  Beethoven’s string quartets are written for four instruments. Not four delicate string instruments and a noisy fan of the power supply and the cpu-cooler and a clattering hard disk. If you are into hard rock this argument might not appeal to you.
  

  Streaming audio players in general don't have moving parts, they are quit by design.
  It is possible to buy or build a PC with few or no moving parts.

• Sound quality
  The average sound card often leaves something to be desired for as far as sound quality is concerned. If there is an analogue out only, there isn't much you can do to improve on it. If there is a digital out, you can improve on it by using an outboard DAC.
  More about sound quality.
• Interface
  The usual stuff, intuitive, etc. But also simple things like size of the display.
  

  In case of classical music, check if it is possible to browse by composer.

• Supported audio formats.

  MP3 support is almost universal. If you want CD quality, check which lossless formats are supported. WAV is a popular lossless format but support for tagging WAV is poor.

• Supported bit depth and sample rates.
  CD quality (16 bits/44.1 kHz) is standard. Check if  24 bit depth and higher sample rates are supported if you plan to play high resolution audio (88.2  – 192 kHz).

• Networking

  In case of streaming audio players, you need a home network as the music comes from the internet or from another computer (often a NAS) in your network.
  Hard disk players can be used without a network but often they use online databases to lookup meta information (tags).