Review: Sony PHA-2

I used to be a Sony PHA-1 owner. For the longest time I ran it with my laptop as an external sound card, which nicely dodged all the noise coming out of the laptop’s built-in audio. Honestly, it worked fine.

Then a few days ago some little bottom I used to gank over and over back in my World of Warcraft days — opposite faction, same server — forced me to sell him my PHA-1. So I had to buy a new one. I considered the Creative E5 first, but word is it’s crap. I also considered the PHA-3, until I found out it needs its own power supply, and my laptop doesn’t have that many USB ports. So the PHA-2 it was.

It arrived, and sure enough: praise be to Sony.

The improvements the PHA-2 has over the PHA-1, besides the extra 1.5 hours of battery life, are the DAC support for Walkman’s own F series and the ZX1, via a dedicated port:

Of course, doing it that way… the ZX1 becomes nothing but storage plus a controller. What’s the proper term? A transport? All the decoding gets handed off to the PHA-2, which feels like a bit of a waste.

The whole thing still looks like the PHA-1, just with a few more features, like LO support.

Since the DAC chip changed, I was worried at first that Linux wouldn’t work with it. The PHA-3’s Linux support is still a mystery — I can’t find anything about it — but the PHA-2 turns out to be plug-and-play, with its own separate option too, not that it’s much use:

Once it was in, I switched it to 192 using the same pulseaudio tweak as last time, so that should be that.

As for how the PHA-2 sounds: simply put, it’s cooler than the PHA-1. What does cooler mean? My own rough understanding is that some of the overtones in vocals and instruments aren’t pushed forward as much, so it sounds dry. Like striking a triangle but the ring-out hanging in the air is deliberately shortened and lowered. That said, I’ve listened to so much warm gear that the cold sound is genuinely satisfying.

Looking at Sony’s products in recent years, there have been plenty of duds and plenty of gems. It feels like the more professional-leaning stuff is more refined and durable — the D50, D100, RX100, and the PHA series — while the consumer stuff isn’t as good.

Overall Sony is still Sony. May its next building sale fetch a good price.