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(IMPORTANT, READ PART TWO FURTHER DOWN)
Wrote this for some other forums and thought I might as well share the info.
So here it is, the walkman I have been waiting for for over 4 years, a decent MP3 player, made by Sony. It appears I have not waited long enough but not for the reasons I expected.
But first a few pieces of back ground. I use my ‘personal audio’ whatever it may be, all the time. On the way to work, at work, at the gym. I average about 6 hours use a day and therefore my standards are high. I’m upgrading from a 3 year old Creative Zen 20Gb, upgradeing only because the battery life has slipped down to about 3 hours nowadays through use, and the HD clicks and sometimes the heads don’t make contact so I have to hit it . . . .
I bought a black NW-A3000 on Friday 25th Nov in the Sony Centre in Totenham Cort Road, London for £199.99. They can be found for cheaper but I just got paid, I just can’t wait for this sort of stuff.
First impressions.
The player is lovely; it’s smooth, silky, fast. You actually want to sit and stroke it when you first take it out of the box. And mantioning the box, it’s hardly a mahogany, varnished case but it does come with a nice presentation style case, good to see they have gone a little further for the presentation.
Sounds.
First listen was to a couple of tracks that were already on the player. Excellent quality sound, very very impressed on that score. I admit I never even took the supplied headphones out of the box, instead I plugged in my trusty MDR-EX71S and had a go with those. Decent bass, not too tinny on the highes and a good rich sound to this machine. Once I finally got some tracks on the player, I was a little less impressed with the MP3s that I ported over, now they were high quality, 320Kbs and ripped slowest most corrected rates I could. It might just be that the vollume level is just too low compared to the last player I had. There are some EQ thingies on the machine but I reckon they’re a waste of time and I never use em.
Menu + Screen.
I like the OLED screen here, I mean it’s not as good as a colour one really, but using a colour screen on something you look at for about 3 minutes a day seems like overkill to me. I have no urge to watch teeny tiny videos on a teeny tiny iSheep. The OLED isn’t as clear as people make out, it is perfectly readable however and has a great oldskool feel to it. The way the screen seems to meld into the case is also worth mentioning it’s not as good in real life as it is in pictures, but it does look very smart all the same.
With the menu system itself I was quite impressed but I’m still getting used to how things work. Put it this way I didn’t need to look at the manual some good features include during playback you can click down on the D pad and choose to look either at the current album, current artist, current genre or related tracks (artist link thing). The menu is very fast and responsive, no lag between clicks or anything nasty like that.
Misc.
There’s a good weight to the NWA-3000, not too heavy and not too light. Just enough weight to make you think it’s well built. On the buld quality I cannot fault Sony, and as a quick test I managed to drop the bugger last night after visiting the pub, 1.5 metres, onto concrete no case. Ooops. Small scratch on the back, and the player works grand still So that’s good.
Software.
Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. Dear. Really this is shocking. I won’t cover this too much as you all know how bad Connect is, but here’s the issues I had.
I installed Connect in about 10 minutes, including a five minute download to patch up to the latest version. I can only say the last one must have literally ripped your computer a new access port if the veriosn I am using is an improvement. Now My PC is not underspecced at all but it ground me to a hault. I’ve got an Athlon 64 3200 and 2Gb RAM, I was not expecting the software to be quite so resource intensive. The tinyhttp.exe that has been mentioned took up a staggering 430 Mb of system memory at one point.
When you start Connect for the very first time you have to import all your tracks into it’s own library. I have 7,500 MP3s and this took a rather impressive 40 minutes (FORTY BLEEDIN MINUTES!!!) to do. Once this has been done you have a standard ish library view of all your tracks and you can simply select or muti select folders/artists/albums etc. and drop them straight onto the players folder. Transfer of MP3s without converting them to atrac takes about 1 minute for a fat album, so nice and quick. You can tick some options to recode your files as Atrac files of whatever bitrate you like – but this currently crashes Connect and requires a reboot + it wipes the HD on the player. Not good, thumbs down Sony.
Oh and one more thing, actually launching Connect is incredible, it pops up a load screen and takes about 5 minutes to properly load. Sometimes even more.
I can only hope that the fabled patch we may get in th next few weeks solves these problems because at the moment it’s almost unusable, I can’t even make playlists it’s so slow.
So to sum up, this is a fantastic piece of kit, at a relatvely good price, let down only by the pathetically bad software that ships with it. Damn you Sony, your going to loose this war with Apple, all because your too pig headed to realise you’ll make more money from Hardware than selling music.
Pffff
Pics:
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Any questions or anything, please ask and I’ll answer if poss.
(
this review cross posted to my blog)
[ This Message was edited by: Tetsugaku-San on 2005-11-27 12:12 ]
[ This Message was edited by: Tetsugaku-San on 2006-02-04 16:15 ]
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Posted: 2005-11-27 13:09:05
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Nice review mate.
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Posted: 2005-11-27 14:43:38
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If your still having troubles with the CONNECT software, download the sonicstage software from the sony website, its alot better and runs smoother than the connect player.
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Posted: 2005-11-27 18:40:01
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Nice mp3 player..
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Posted: 2005-11-27 19:39:16
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On 2005-11-27 18:40:01, waibun_lee wrote:
If your still having troubles with the CONNECT software, download the sonicstage software from the sony website, its alot better and runs smoother than the connect player.
Thanks man, I would but it appears sonic stage doesn't support all the things on the new player properly, Alegedly there is a huge update coming in the next week or two when this thing launches in Japan - Europe appears to have been used to beta test, grrrr.
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Posted: 2005-11-28 09:43:52
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Hi Tetsugaku-San!
Nice review of a beautiful Sony-player! I couldn't find anybody else with a black A3000, and I'm thinking of buying one for myself. Could you post a few more livepics? Perhaps the back of the unit and a picture where the buttons are lit? Is the display-color really blue, oder more green? Is it possible to change the colour?
What colour does the backlight of the buttons have, or asked in another way: when are they orange and when white? Do they just change on purpose?
Thanks in advance and sorry for my poor English
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Posted: 2005-12-04 23:53:59
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@Tetsugaku-San, Nice review mate
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Posted: 2005-12-05 00:06:03
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Hey guys, thanx for the feedback, rather than answer questions here if you go to this thread :
http://www.atraclife.com/index.php?showtopic=489 then you can see where people have asked the same questions and I answered
Cheers
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Posted: 2005-12-05 19:02:58
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I shall check this out, I am interested in one of these players as a gift.
The OLED looks to be amazing. Very good pics man!
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Posted: 2005-12-15 06:55:40
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Right it's funny how you opinions can change on something after a while isn't it?For example I used to think Star Wars was great until I watched all of the prequels and felt betrayed, I feel Sony has done the same to me with my NW-A3000.
Please read the review
part one
Anyway - ignore everything I said about the player. Well not all of it. The player still rules on one thing - sound quality - honestly the thing does sound fantastic.
What it does fall down on is this: Software (transfering files), controls (the menus make no sense), functonality (you can't make a playlist on the fly), build quality (the thing breaks VERY easily)
I've had the player for ten weeks and it's currently in for repair under warranty. This is what has finally broken me and I'm going to sell it on ebay as soon as it comes back. I dropped the player from my train seat, 50cm onto carpet, and the controls stopped working.
Can youbelieve that? I am firmly of the opinion if ssomething is sold as 'mobile' it should BE 'mobile' not so delicate that you have to put it in a case, in a bag, wrapped in bubble wrap inside another bag to keep it safe. Piece of crap. My last Creative MP3 player I dropped onto concrete a few dozen times and that survived for 3 years! this lasted 10 weeks!!
The other horrendous problem is the software. It just doens't work. I don't mean 'a bit crap' I mean really just does not do what you want it to do. For example I wanted to make a playlist for walking and going to the gym, so some nice rock tunes and happy up beat stuff. I managed to get 250 songs in the list but it took me about two hours to make! TWO HOURS!!! Just not good enough I'm afraid, not good enough at all.
DO NOT buy this player. under ANY circumstances (unless you want mine off ebay
)
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Posted: 2006-02-04 17:14:54
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