General: Sony Walkman

Finally, a walkman to rival the iPods dominance.

Got my hands on the NWZ-A818 today for my 20th Birthday. It really is one of those items where in pictures you think it looks kinda okay, but in person, it looks phenomenal. It's also ludicrously tiny, about 8mm thick. It's so small, it fits in the credit card slots in my wallet.

I love the headphones. I have never seen such a brilliant pair bundled with any MP3 player. They easily perform as well as my Shure E2Cs, which cost me £65, yet the whole mp3 player including the headphones was £80, so this is also an unbelievably well priced unit, undercutting Apples Nano (and easily outperforming it in every respect IMHO).

The screen is simply superb, something I have come to expect from Sony after the stunning screen on the PSP.
The sound quality beats the Nano hands down. The Nano distorts at high volumes, especially rock music.

I tested my player out using a range of different, testing genres of music. My Hotel Costes collection was done excellant justice, the smooth sounds of French Lounge filling the space between my ears gloriously. My Caspa Rusko Fabriclive CD, one of the most testing albums for bass performance I have come across, also sounded fabulous.
Generally, no matter what music I chucked at it, the player responded with beautifully balanced sound.

I personally prefer Sony's navigation too. Although the iPod is nodoubt revolutionary.....I find clickwheels tricky to use, and they don't neccessarily give you any real advantage. So although Sony's directional pad interface is more primitive, it suits me.

Having a headphone socket at the bottom is one of those design features where you wonder why it hasn't been seen before - it's so obviously better.

Generally, I'm so far thoroughly impressed. The only annoyance is a slight pause between tracks, meaning you get small gaps between tracks on mix albums and suchlike. It's minor...and I guess it might be fixed in a firmware update.

Cool stuff.

Yeah. I think iPods sound generally pretty poor. This could be because they cater more to people who listen to pop music where quality is not of the utmost of importance, and where a flashy interface is more eye catching.

What also impresses me is the metal construction, it's super light but feels tough. I'm still amazed at how thin it is!

I wish I could confirm that.....but I haven't heard a minidisc in ages.
However, being Sony, you know their likely to put a lot of effort into reproducing the best sound possible.
I would have gone for the A829 too, but it is far too expensive.

It's such a shame minidisc isn't widely available any more. (I know Ivan agrees... he covets my RH-1 somewhat)

It's when you plug these players in to a decent HI-FI system, then the difference is obvious. mp3, wma and the like, even at their best settings, lossless etc sound hard, clinical and tiring to listen to for even short periods. (5 or 6 minutes for me) I only use my ZEN V + for talking books. and the occasional listen to the news on the radio when I'm out.

My Sony MDS JB940 deck is still working fine and sounds better than my TEAC VRDS 10 SE CD player, which is slightly annoying as the TEAC CD machine cost over six times as much. (I guess this would benefit from a newer better external DAC as it's getting on a bit)

I suppose Minidisc has died because 1, most people don't seem to care that much for sound quality and 2, mp3 players with large memories can hold huge amounts of music without the need to change or carry extra disc's. To me that takes the fun out of it, I like having a collection of disc's and of course with the right headphones on the MZ-R909 Walkman, the great sound quality.

I've just dusted off my MZ-N505 and can confirm that my Sony MP3 player is at least it's equal when playing a good file. It's very difficult to judge though as the Minidisc unit is much louder.

I'm not sure I agree with you Mike, although I think I understand where you're coming from. I think a good system is a good system and all music sounds better on a good system. If you say dance music needs more emphasis on bass and mids then you'd be colouring the sound, it's up to the engineer what eq he wants to apply when mixing/mastering. I'd probably agree that most pop music is made to sound punchy on a cheap system whereas classical seems to be better engineered and less compressed and yes a full orchestra needs a good system to separate the instruments and threads of music. I'd still rather listen to all my music on a proper hifi than any other way.

Posted By: Mike

I think my point still stands because if all you listen to is rap music and pop music then your money is wasted on high quality audio equipment - which will not really make it sound any better. I'll happily admit I quite like some of Timbalands music, but the difference in sound quality between my Shure headphones and the ones that came with my old player is negligible, and buying the Shures for that type of music wouldn't have been justified.
It'd be a bit like building a huge garage to park your mini in.

Ok. Can we agree to disagree on this?

Sure.

But you know I'm right. hehe

Mike, you are now in danger of causing a flame, having the last word for the sake of it is not clever and not required. This is a blog site for intelligent discussion, please don't spoil it.

However, the comment that Classical (in the loosest sense of the term) requiring a good system is very true. I have no idea whether it needs a better system to sound as good as the equivalent popular styles, but in general music written before the 20th Century was much more densely polyphonic (several independent lines of music going on at once), and a poor quality audio setup ruins the experience. However, I am sure that this can be the same for many other types of music. Needless to say, as Coyote notes, most people either can't tell the difference or aren't bothered. I hope my MD unit keeps going for many more years!

Yes; most film scores are performed by leading symphony orchestras (John Williams tends to write for the London Symphony Orchestra, for instance) and it's the sort of sonority that really benefits from a really broad frequency range reproduction.

The music which arguably requires the best equipment to play back satisfactorily is organ music - the organ has the largest range of any instrument (from 16Hz, or, rarely, 8Hz, to over 18kHz) and, considering that the limits of human hearing are generally agreed to be 20Hz-20kHz this represents almost the complete audible range and then some (you can't hear 16Hz but you can most definitely feel it!).

Most MP3 players can't reproduce or record anything below about 40Hz or above about 16kHz.