SONY HAP-S1 HDD Audio Player System review

Sound quality through both headphones and the main amp is outstanding. We tested the system with Sony’s SS-HA1 (£499, www.sony.co.uk) speakers, which are designed to have a broad 48Hz-50KHz frequency response to make the most of the system’s high-resolution output. The sound was clean, detailed and spacious. We distinguished lots of detail in our favourite tracks, from the natural slap of drum skins in King Crimson’s The Court of the Crimson King to the warm strings of Ulver’s Like Music. There was also clearly audible detail and space between the harsh guitars of Coldworld’s Hymn to the Eternal Frost.

With the press of a button the HAP-S1 can also make use of Sony’s DSEE sound enhancement technology, which uses digital interpolation to restore high-frequency sound removed by lossy compression. An example of a file created with lossy compression is the MP3. If you’re familiar with a particular piece of music then you’ll notice some improvement in quality when DSEE is enabled. However, we’d still recommend using lossless file formats in the first place.

The HAP-S1 sounds fantastic and looks and feels every inch the high-end hi-fi separate, but it’s extremely expensive for something that lacks so many features we’ve come to expect from such devices. We were surprised and dismayed to find that we couldn’t just connect and play a drive full of tracks, and the inability to stream tracks from other devices on your network seems like a missed opportunity given the HAP-S1’s Ethernet port. Lack of support for popular streaming services such as Spotify is also a serious omission.

The £275 Denon Ceol Piccolo DRA-N5 streaming home audio system lacks a hard disk but its support for 192KHz/24-bit streaming audio makes it a more sensible alternative for those who don’t have to keep all their music in one place with limited storage capacity. We like the HAP-S1. However, we really hoped that it would deliver modern, networked convenience along with its excellent sound quality, and it doesn’t. If there’s some way that Sony can implement wider streaming and online service access with a software update then, for us, the HAP-S1 would be near perfect.