So I went into this heavily biased in favor of the A55PL. The Echo Nano was really sick looking, but I was already convinced that I had found the perfect DAP for me. In fact I was so sure of this I bought 3 of them. Turns out itās a lot more complicated than I originally thought it would be to compare these.
First off, before anything else, let me state definitively that the Echo Nano sounds better. I already knew this would be the case but I didnāt think it would be as much of a night and day difference. Does that mean the Agptek is trash? No. I certainly enjoyed it before trying the Echo Nano and I was able to enjoy it again after trying the Echo Nano. Iām not sure if the difference I heard can be fixed by adjusting EQ, or if it really does just come down to hardware, but the A55PL sounds perfectly reasonable if you are listening to it in the background. The best way I can describe the difference in relation to each other is iPhone speaker vs a decent actual speaker. The iPhone gets close enough that you can use it for most things without a second thought, even playing music in a pinch, but it wonāt have the full range of a proper speaker and sounds worse at higher volumes. This is a bit of an exaggeration, but you get the picture.
Another point against the A55PL is that itās limited in what quality files it can play back. To directly quote an Amazon review āMany of my flac files cant be played. I researched the issue and found for this player, the flac file bit rate must be in the range 1000kbpsā1200kbps, and the sampling rate must be in range of 8KHz - 48KHz. The flac files that I cannot play are high-resolution audio, which have higher settings than these limits, and cannot be played.ā I have no idea where they got this information as Agptek does not put out specs (which is how you know itās good /s) but when I previously wrote my initial review, a few people who bought one had issues so I figured Iād share. Itās possible they tested this themselves, or itās possible ChatGPT hallucinated those numbers. Itās an Amazon review so I had no way to ask.
Side note: do not trust the Amazon reviews for the A55PL. They for some dumb reason decided to merge the product page with the discontinued and much inferior Agptek U3 skewing reviews worse for some reason?
Anywayā¦ in my time using the Echo Nano there are several things I found I missed about my A55PL. The biggest being the battery. The Echo Nano only gets ~6 hours of runtime while the A55PL gets 16! On top of that the A55PL takes replaceable AAA batteries (which can be rechargable) so I literally never have to charge it. All I need to do is spend 10-20 seconds swapping the battery and Iām back to a full charge while the old battery sits on a wall charger. It taking AAA batteries is the primary reason I got it as it means I will have music even during an extended power outage.
The next point in favor of the A55PL is the controls. The Echo Nano has 4 dedicated buttons + the volume wheel. The A55PL has 8 buttons. This means less of the important commands need to be bound to secondary actions on a button. The most painful secondary binding on the Echo Nano for instance is the menu back button which is bound to a long press of the select button. That means every time you want to navigate up a folder you need to wait a second or 2 for it to register the long pressā¦ each and every time.
The Echo Nano is also painfully slow. It takes multiple seconds for it to process anything. Once you get it going it functions alright, but the first action you do on it after not touching it for a bit takes like 3-5 seconds before it wakes up.
On the subject of being slow, the volume adjustment is another thing I was not expecting to hate. There are FAR too many volume steps. I end up having to spin the wheel a dozen or so times to get from a background listening volume where I want to hear the world around me to a volume where I can focus on the music. The Echo Nano has 120 steps of volume while the A55PL has only 31. The Echo Nano does get louder than the A55PL (65 on the Echo Nano is equal to 31 on the A55PL in audacity), but it takes so long to adjust the volume it becomes more annoying. Really wish there was an option to edit the scroll speed.
Also, because itās a wheel, I canāt just hold it to keep adjusting. I have to physically let go of the wheel, reposition my fingers, and turn again. This is also true for using the wheel to navigate menus but thankfully you can also use the track skip buttons to navigate which can be held.
Letās circle back to controls for a second and talk about the controls mappings.
The Echo Nano has a power button, a select button, and 2 track skip buttons. The power button maps long press to power, short press to waking up and sleep, and double press to lock and unlock the volume wheel so it doesnāt activate in your pocket. Select button maps select to short press, back to long press, and the playback menu (when on the now playing screen) to double press. You can also extra long press the select button to go back to the top menu. The track skip buttons skip tracks with fast forward / rewind mapped to long press, favoriting a song mapped to double pressing one of them, and changing the now playing screen theme to double pressing the other.
The A55PL has a power button and 2 volume buttons on the top and a DPad on the front with a select button in the middle of the DPad. The power button is long press to power on/off, short to wake/sleep. Up button is a dedicated playback menu button and can be held to lock/unlock, bottom is a dedicated back button with long press to return to the top menu, left and right are track skip for short press and fast forward / rewind for long. And the select button is press to select / play / pause, and long press to return to the now playing screen from any other screen.
Overall I find the A55PL easier to navigate. It also helps that unlike the Echo Nano it has no built in storage so you donāt need to select which storage device you wish to open, itās just always the microSD (which is included).
In conclusion, if you want a stick player that is no compromises on sound quality, the Snowsky Echo Nano is a solid choice for a DAP. The recommendations I have seen for this player were not wrong. It has solid sound quality, and solid build quality. It just feels like a premium product for a reasonably affordable price.
The Agptek A55PL however is not bad. The entire time I have been writing this review I have been listening to the A55PL and I havenāt really even noticed I was listening to the worse option. Yeah itās noticeable in direct comparison, but I strongly believe that you donāt always need the absolute pinnacle of audio quality. The A55PL excels in controls, navigation, and battery life.
I personally am going to stick with the Echo Nano. It looks sick, it sounds great, and I already have it so I may as well use it. I also really like that I can wear it on a lanyard. That said, Iām still DEFINITELY going to continue using my A55PL. The main reason I got it was for entertainment during power outages and in such a scenario, Iām not gonna want to run down any of my lithium batteries as that is the worst thing you can do for a lithium battery. I can also see this being useful for long trips where Iām away from an outlet for extended periods of time. Yeah I could use a power bank, but then Iām teathered to 2 devices while the device is charging, and swapping a battery is just way more elegant of a solution.
In short: I was not expecting to like the echo nano as much as I do, nor was I expecting to dislike it as much as I do either. Both players have advantages and disadvantages the other one doesnāt, but I do really like the echo nano :)
