ceres

http://asia.cnet.com/reviews/musicplay/0,3...37085p-3,00.htm review by cnet asia that lauds "stunning audio quality"

Hi Mike, I don´t know if I get your question right but you can always create a playlist for a singe directory for instance using the create playlist feature of mp3tag. You can dl this incredibly useful tool from www.mp3tag.de. There is a Union Jack at the right hand, top corner. Click it for English instructions. Once you have created the playlist, you can drag and drop it in Sonic Stage. I hope this helps. Cheers!

Well, I cannot concur. We are talking 30% plus based on a device (nano 8gig) that is already a premium priced product although the pod itself is a priced for profits gadget with huge margins for apple. anyway, 30% would be acceptable if radio and noice cancelling were included in the a800 but sony omitted these features. I don´t think they would have gone in the red including these features. I cannot help but point out that Sony Japan and Canada are offering competitively priced devices with the same warranty coverage as here in Germany. Mind you, per capita income is higher in both Canada and Japan. Again, in Europe Sony is screwing over the consumer....as they have done with PS3....as they will always do. Obviously Ericsson has much say in the se joint venture as the situation in this sector is entirely different.

In deed nice deal. Unfortunately, here in Germany Sony announced a 33% higher price point, also 30% higher than the nano. With arrogant pricing like this the device will bomb here although I can see prices dropping sharply after 3 months. At any rate, great deal for canada.

don´t know when but rather sooner than later I hope. One more thing to fix is slow scroll speed in artist/album view. it takes a year to browse from a-z.

Supreme Audio and great UI. T9 is a winner.

I have noticed some static when I turn on the player but once music starts playing the static subsides even at low volumes. I own Sony Ex90s as well as UE Superfi5Pros and the effect is there with both phones. Strangely enough static is sometimes noiser and more prolonged, sometimes more subtle. It also kind of depends how long the player has been running. It´s the most annoying when I turn it on after a few hours of non operation.

I am running the exact combination without any problems.

try to create another user account in vista an do a fresh install on this account of 4.3 use a different directory as the installation destination. maybe that will work.

hard to contrain myself. looks like an impulse buy....

I am running Ultimate X64 w/o major complaints. There are minor stability issues but at this point of time there are many programs that exhibit this type of behavior under X64, unfortunately.

Please re-read the Eurogamer article. It´s going to be a redesign along the lines what sony has done with the ps2. New, slimmer shell etc, not a groundbreaking shakeup of built in hardware or feature set. Sony needs the latter though imo.

Depending on where you live I would suggest you buy Panasonic HJE 70 in Ear Monitors. These sport great sensitivity and cranking up the S7 past 20 will cause permanent hearing loss. If you can´t get these phones locally search on ebay or log onto www.audiocubes.com ceres

I have owned every iPod since the 2nd gen mini except for the 2nd gen shuffle. These pods have been passed on to brothers and sisters as well to parents so they are all available to me for testing purposes. Baseline audio quality on the iPod in general is good, not great, good. Truth be told the 1st gen shuffle surpasses all other pods by a considerable margin. It´s a farce Apple hasn´t included this audio hardware in the more expensive lines. Compared to S7 or Samsung T9 the current iPod lineups falls way short in terms of audio quality with the 2nd gen shuffle at the sorry end. This device is a true failure with horrific sound quality. When you compare an S7 or T9 with any actual iPod you immediately notice a much more powerful and broader sound stage with explosive - not muddy base foundation, great stereo channel separation and instrumental clarity that is immediately, demonstrably superior to the iPod lineup. It´s like day and night on some tracks such as Wasted State of Mind - ...Trail of Dead or In the Backseat - Arcade Fire. I own quite an assortment of phones such as Pana HJE 70 (great deal from Japan/UK), Sony MX 90, Super Fi 5Pro and any of these phones exhibit a pronouncedly better sound reproduction on T9 and S7. On the iPod the step up in audio quality from HJE70 to SuperFi5 is there but marginal in comparison to what one experiences on S7 and T9. Of course 2nd gen Nano is rumored to use Samsung chips. It doesn´t show.

Are you saying that there is a menu entry other than alvs that lets you disengage the cap? I have bought my 706 in Japan, so it´s not an issue right now. Should my unit however fail, I´d be curious to know. BTW, Samsung T9 outputs 12.2 mw@27 ohms, S706 4,8 mw. However my listening tests did not reveal any difference in max voulme or bass performance. Both were able to drive my supplied phones to ear splitting levels. So it appears that we non French Europeans are not getting hammered any longer. At least as long as we don´t buy iPods.

I´d suggest you go try them all in a store of your choice. Bring the phones you usually use and crank it up.

who told you it isnt capped? I reckon it is although it still gets plenty loud, at least with efficient phones.

Same here although Sony SQ dropped after HD5 but is back at industry´s best with the S7. About cowon: I used to own an x5 but sound was a tad worse than hd5 plus too bulky. The new D2 looks interesting although not as polished as clix. nevertheless, I´d like to take a look. A808 would need to drop to around 220 street price to be worth some thought. I heard the finish applied is matte plastic and not anodized aluminum. one more reason to shun it.

I had the same feelings when I initially bought my AW 1000. I returned it and went iPod for 2yrs. Now I am back with the S706. I would try to uninstall SS and then install again. Perform a thorough uninstall as described in the guide available software forum. That should do the trick.

I reckon SS hangs as it likes to crash while updating AAC tags. Try to update only mp3s and see if this works better. a side note: SS cannot possibly be compared to itunes. itunes runs circles around SS. it´s not even funny any longer.

you are right. especially reducing the bitrate to half will not yield quality results.

do not transcode from a lossy codec (mp3) to another lossy codec (atrac). The result will be inferior audio quality´. Only transcode from lossless (FLAC, Wavpack, Apple Lossless etc) audio to lossy (mp3, aac, wma etc.)

The exclusion of hardware needed previously to ensure backward compatibilty in favor of a software solution isn´t per se bad. CELL should have enough power to emulate EE. So what it boils down to is how many games won´t be supported by new firmware upgrades. As long as there are no hard facts out there, the story isn´t really worth much. Also asking 599 may be harsh in terms of current games library quality/quantity it is not too much considering blue ray. There are lot of people out there that crave hd quality movies even at a higher cost. From today´s gamer´s point of view the price of blue ray drives up unit cost considerably. w/o blue ray the price point would have been around 399 along with the 360. It´s quite apparent that today´s gamer was not the only target group of Sony Corp. One could blame them for using this target group as a pawn in the hd war against hddvd but who knows where game capacity needs will be in only 2 years. By then of course the 360 will also have another model out there with a hddvd drive at a lower cost as production will have matured. I don´t see PS3 failing. Of course 360 is so good as a gaming machine that Sony won´t dominate as it did with PS2. But that was to expected given the quality of Microsoft and quite an achievement for Redmond. The consumer as well should benefit from a more competitive Market.

Update: I have tried more ways to import aac audio into Sonic Stage. I have created raw aac audio and wrapped the files in a 3gpp container using mp4 box. Again to no avail. The files can be imported into SS but tags won´t be read. SS uses a new 100% proprietary tag scheme. Pathetically SS cannot get cd info for AAC/MP4 files w/o crashing in 100% of all instances. Again Sony has managed to cripple an important software function and imposed stupid limitations on the user locking out those who have a multitude of aac files be it from itunes encoder, winamp or nero. What good is aac support w/o propper tagging? ZERO. As to the quality of the included encoder I will conduct some ABX Testing today. However Nero AAC is a great and free encoder providing better quality than lame mp3 @128 -160kbs, and delivering consistent transparent results @192kbs. This cannot be claimed for ATRAC.

that of course depends on where you live.