The Fosi Audio DAP Neo is a digital audio player with a click wheel on the front, a 3.5mm jack for your headphones and no way whatsoever of reaching the internet. No Wi-Fi, no apps, no streaming services, no notifications. It costs £79 at the time of writing, and the list of things it refuses to do is the whole reason to want one.

Every other maker has spent the last few years going the opposite way. The iBasso DX180, one of the other players in our digital audio player guide, runs Android 13 on a Snapdragon 665, so Tidal and Qobuz install on it exactly as they would on a phone. It costs £499. The FiiO M23, another Android player in that guide, is £839. Fosi Audio has taken all of that out, charged £79, and put a wheel on the front, which takes a certain amount of nerve in 2026.

We have run ours wired, with a pair of in ear monitors on the end of the cable, which is how we expect most people will use it. Bluetooth is on board and it works, but it was not the route we took.

Fosi Audio supplied us with the DAP NEO free of charge.

It is a small metal rectangle with a wheel on it, and it is not pretending you will fail to notice what that reminds you of. The housing is machined from metal on a five axis CNC rather than moulded, the back panel is micron etched AG glass that keeps fingerprints off it, and the finishes are called Galaxy and Obsidian. Ours is the Obsidian.

The numbers that matter are the small ones. It measures 97 x 47 x 10.6mm and weighs 75g or under. Clip that to a pocket with a cable running up to your ears and you stop registering that it is there at all, which is the opposite of what a phone does to a pocket.

The screen is a 2in TFT LCD at 320 by 240. That is small, and it is supposed to be. There is nothing on it that you need to read from the far side of a room, and nothing on it competing for a glance.

The full sheet, from Fosi Audio's own listing:

One line in that list deserves reading twice, because it is the one real limit on the thing. The microSD slot stops at 256GB. If your library lives as FLAC on a hard drive somewhere, you are not bringing all of it, and you will be curating what goes on the card. That is either a chore or a feature depending on your mood, but it is worth knowing before you order rather than after.

The case for this player is not nostalgia. It is that your listening stops being steered by anything other than you. Nothing on here can suggest what you play next, because nothing on here is storing what you played last week. Pick the record, press play, and that is the end of the decision making. For anyone who has noticed how much of their listening is now chosen for them, the relief of that is immediate.

There is a second effect, and it matters to every artist and label we cover. A player that cannot stream is a player you have to feed, and the only way to feed it is to go and buy music. Every file on that memory card is one somebody paid for, and the money went somewhere useful; the artist’s pocket. Set that against a device running a streaming app and the maths for the people making the records is not close.

It also explains who is actually buying these. The people hunting down second hand iPods on eBay are mostly in their twenties, and they are not doing it for the wheel. They want a few hours where nothing is making recommendations at them, and the DAP Neo is one of the only new devices built for that instinct rather than against it. Fosi Audio has worked out what the market wants and sold it for £79.

Where it is the wrong purchase is if you want one device to do everything. There is no Tidal, no Qobuz, no internet radio and nothing at all you have not loaded by hand. If that is a dealbreaker then the iBasso DX180 in our guide to the best digital audio players worth buying right now is the answer at the other end of the argument, at six times the money.

Setup is dragging files onto a card and putting the card in the player. There is no account, no app on your phone and no firmware dance before you can hear anything.

The interface is the other half of the appeal. There is barely any of it: a few menus, your music, and no settings labyrinth to get lost in. Fosi has clearly spent the design effort on taking things away, and the result is a player your hands learn in about a minute. Controls are split between the wheel and a set of side buttons, and the response to both is quick and consistent.

The wheel is where we would ask for a change. It physically rotates, rather than reading your thumb the way the capacitive wheel on the iPod it evokes used to, and the surface is very smooth indeed. Smooth enough that a thumb skates across it now and then instead of turning it. A few raised bumps around the rim would sort that out and cost Fosi next to nothing on the next revision.

Two absences are worth knowing before you buy. Fosi states that there is no gapless playback, which you will never notice on a pop album and will notice straight away on a mix, a live record or anything beatmatched from end to end. And the Bluetooth sends only, on SBC, so it will drive a pair of wireless headphones but it will not take audio from your phone.

Sound quality is excellent, and that is the headline rather than a courtesy. It is also the reason the hardware choices stop being trivia. A single Cirrus Logic CS43198 does the conversion, with a claimed 127dB signal to noise ratio behind it and 129mW coming out of the 3.5mm jack. That is a DAC you find in players costing several times this one.

FLAC is the question people ask about a cheap player, and the answer here is a good one. Drop FLAC files on the card and they play at full quality rather than getting quietly squashed on the way out. WAV, APE, M4A and DSD all go on too, so a library assembled over years out of Bandcamp purchases and the odd CD rip arrives intact.

The headphone jack is doing more work than a spec sheet makes it look like. Going wired means there is no second battery in the chain to keep half an eye on, no pairing, and no codec negotiation deciding what your music sounds like. Plug in a set of wired IEMs or earbuds, as we did, and the only thing that can run out of charge is the player. If you are shopping for the other end of that cable, our guide to the best DJ headphones for every budget includes in ear options.

Battery life is excellent. Fosi quotes a maximum of 12 hours and notes that what you actually get depends on how you have it set up, which is the honest way to publish that figure. A player that lasts a working day and a commute either side of it does not need you to think about charging.

Bluetooth works perfectly well, for the record, but it is not the reason to buy this. With a jack on the bottom of the player, the SBC only radio is a footnote rather than the problem it would be on a device without one. If you do want it wireless, our guide to the best Bluetooth audio transmitters covers the better codecs, though spending more on a dongle than on the player is a funny way to go about it.

Yes. The Fosi Audio DAP Neo scores 9/10 and keeps the Waveform Wavemaker award it took in our digital audio player guide. Excellent sound from a proper DAC, a headphone jack, FLAC at full quality, 12 hours of battery and a body light enough to forget about, for £79. The industry has spent years adding screens, radios and app stores to these things, and Fosi has gone and proved that most of it was never needed.

Two things to weigh first. The microSD slot caps out at 256GB, so a large FLAC collection is staying at home and you are choosing what travels. And that click wheel is slicker underfoot than it ought to be, which is a niggle rather than a fault but a real one. Neither changes the recommendation.

If you need the whole library on board and the streaming apps with it, the iBasso DX180 takes microSD cards up to 2TB and runs Android, at £499. For everyone else, the two buttons below are the only places to get a DAP Neo, because nobody else stocks it. The European store serves UK visitors in sterling, so £79 is the cheapest route from here.

Fosi Audio supplied the DAP Neo reviewed here free of charge. Free products are only provided to aid our testing and do not affect our honest opinion.

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