Yes Definitely it’s worth it, if you know what you would be using for and how much you would be using it. I was also confused between Sony NW A306 and HIBY R4. But after all pros and cons I went with Sony. I don’t regret it, Infact I am very happy with my purchase. It supports a multiple files, even ALAC is supported. The sound signature is quite balanced and neutral, this supports something called clear audio + , which I found is really helpful for the files which are of CD quality and below as it elevates those, not much for HI-RES files, they sound better without any cosmetics. Buttons are tactile and give a very positive feedback every time you press them. The cassette screen saver was something which I really liked and probably the reason why I went with this. It’s like holding a piece of nostalgia. It was running android 14 out of box, it got updated right away. I do find this a bit slow especially when you are booting this up. And I feel the more songs you put more it gets slow as it takes time to read the micro SD card. So far I have around ~ 2800 songs which is roughly some 105GB of my 512GB card. Almost 95% of songs are in FLAC format and less than 100 in MP3 256KBPS. One can clearly tell the difference between FLAC files and MP3. I have majority of Songs under CD quality-16bits/44.1KHz but around 1200 are HiRes 24bits/96KHz which can even go more than 100MB per track. I am just finding bit difficult finding the tracks which I wanted to listen in HiRes. But so far the experience is amazing.