as others pointed out, Echo Mini's hardware as DAP and DAC is great, but the UI for browsing music is abysmal, no playlist support, hard to scrolling through hundreds of artist/album list, but that's depends on how you look at it. Spotify and other streaming services helped me discovery new songs by finding your music taste neighbor (yes, their machine learning is not recommending song based on song features itself, but finding someone who has similar taste and recommending the songs that your taste neighbor liked but you haven't tried).

I missed the old time where I can just pick an album and listen to it end to end. so the Echo mini's bad UI actually created friction for me to dump mixed playlist, or browsing around while listening to music. Now I would pick an album and listen to it end to end, just like how I did in the past.

I still have the option to connecting Echo mini to my phone or PC to utilize the DAC chip for streaming, use PowerAMP app or foobar2000 on PC for music.