With a combined 50 years of professional and consumer audio experience, our team has tried out almost every digital music player since the Diamond Rio and has spent countless hours putting these devices through their paces.

Why you should buy this: It’s lightweight, durable, and built for exercise, with reasonable storage capacity and an excellent battery life.

Who it’s for: Anyone looking to listen to music while they work out.

Why we chose the Sandisk Clip Sport:

Using your smartphone to listen to music while exercising is nearly always a hassle. If you’re running, the phone is probably bouncing uncomfortably in your pocket, or you’re forced to hold it with a vice grip because you wore shorts without pockets (stop forgetting the shorts with pockets!).

Thankfully, MP3 players with clips — like the SanDisk Clip Sport — were built specifically to resolve that issue. What the Clip Sport lacks in audio quality, it more than makes up for with several useful features and a rock-solid 25-hour battery life.

Apart from the eponymous clip, SanDisk equipped this workout buddy with an FM radio tuner so you can listen to your favorite morning talk show as you take your brisk pre-breakfast stroll. The player features an LCD screen so you don’t need to rely on the “shuffle” function. The Clip Sport includes 32GB of onboard flash storage, as well as an SD card slot that allows for more storage space to be added in later. Capable of handling most audio file types (including FLAC files), this little guy is perfectly equipped for a marathon or a Tough Mudder.

Why you should buy this: You’re an Apple devotee and you prefer the iPod family.

Who it’s for: Casual listeners, intentional users of non-smart phones.

Why we chose the iPod Touch:

Despite the iPod’s iconic nature, the rise of the iPhone has taken most of the shine off the gadget that reinvented the way we listen to music. Apple no longer rolls out new editions of each iPod every year, and some unfortunate limitations keep the player from reaching its true potential. Still, the ever-friendly user interface and the sleek beauty of the experience (and of the iPod itself) earn the sixth-generation iPod Touch a spot on our list.

With the ability to store up to 128 gigabytes of your favorite tunes, plus smartphone-like functionality including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, as well as app integrations (including the ability to use Apple Music for streaming), there is no better iPod for casual listeners and those who don’t want to carry a smartphone.

The iPod Touch is small and light, and comes wrapped in cool metal finishes, with a gorgeous retina display that makes browsing between albums easy. It even has both forward and rear-facing cameras for snapping the odd picture on the go. There’s also up to 40 hours of battery life, enough for a full workweek of listening.

Why you should buy this: Loud, “Boombox” speaker, a stand-alone quad DAC, DTS.X 3D support … oh, and it doubles as a phone.

Who it’s for: Music lovers who would rather just use their phone.

Why we chose the LG V50 ThinQ 5G :

Most smartphones’ music capabilities are extremely limited. Having access to streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music is important, but not everyone is willing to sacrifice sound quality and functionality for a bigger library of music.

Thankfully, with the LG V50 ThinQ 5G, you don’t have to choose. LG continues its quest to preserve the sanctity of your audio, bringing full hi-res support and pristine audio quality to anything you plug into the phone’s 3.5 mm audio jack. The V50 ThinQ also supports DTS:X 3D surround sound, a technology similar to Dolby Atmos. Add up to 1TB of storage to the 128GB you get as standard, and you won’t have to worry about moving tracks in and out of the rotation.

Also returning is its unique “Boombox” speaker, which is a single, bottom-firing mono speaker that uses the phone’s entire body as a resonance chamber. It may seem like a gimmick on paper, but we found the speaker to be extremely rich and loud, offering some of the best fidelity we’ve ever heard from the sometimes-tinny smartphone segment. It’s good enough to lessen the need for a Bluetooth speaker in intimate listening environments.

Ultimately, the LG V50 ThinQ is worth a buy if you’re in need of both a smartphone and a hi-res music player. It’s not the king of either category, necessarily, but there are few — if any — phones that can match the quality of its audio output. The V50 ThinQ is a fully capable smartphone from a brand with a lot of trusted skin in the game. Plus, it’s ready for a 5G future that brings even more speed to handle data-intensive streaming services.

High-resolution audio uses a higher sampling rate and a higher bit rate than regular audio files. A typical hi-res audio file is sampled at 96kHz/24bit, which means that the audio is “sampled” more frequently each second than a typical MP3 file, which loses around 90 percent of its information during the compression process.

Hi-res files (like FLAC files) process information more than 20 times faster than MP3 files, which means that those little details in the music — such as the attack and decay of a single guitar pluck — can be heard more clearly by the human ear. MP3 files are quick and dirty representations of actual songs that have been compressed in order to save storage space. High-resolution audio, on the other hand, is compressed in such a way that those little details are preserved.