mrsmr2

Just a quick update. I went for Cowon D2 in the end. The extra flexibility it offered by being able to play lots of formats, that I could connect via USB for drag and drop, its picture viewing, and (surprisingly good) video playback made it worth the extra money. Audio quality with my Shure E4Gs is also very good. Regards

That's very helpful, thanks. I can find a 706 for £113 and the D2 is likely to be £190. The D2 has a good screen and can play videos (not really that important for me) plus drag and drop and the ability to play lots of formats. The 706 on the other hand is much smaller, possibly has a better radio, and very good headphones. Decisions, decisions. Are there any mods (like Rockbox) that allow drag and drop?

I'm a newbie to posting on this forum but it has provided me with a lot of intersting reading so far. I'm after advice for a replacement to my MZ-R909 MD player which I think is great but I'm getting fed up with real time copying and having to type in track names, letter by letter. I originally posted this wish list on a couple of other forums: - sound quality at least as good as my MD player (I would encode MP3s at 256 or 320kbps); - ability to play OGG Vorbis; - have long battery life (>30 hours if possible); - ability to simply connect the player to the PC and drag files over using Explorer - FM radio would be nice but not too important - durable so I guess flash would be the best option My main requirement is audio quality and I would also like something small and durable. My MD player is great but something smaller than that would be great. iAudio/Cowon were recommended as being about the best for audio quality and I settled on a 4GB D2. However, this isn't out in Europe at the moment so I'm still researching other players. The NWS706 looks very good and there are good comments about it's audio quality. I know it doesn't meet some of the above requirements but I could live with that if the audio quality was good enough. General questions on Sony MP3 players: a) How do Sony's compare to iAudio products for sound quality? How do Sony players compare to my 909 (I encode at SP or LP2)? Specific questions on the 706: 1) are the supplied headphones better than my EX70s? 2) does it support ATRAC Type R - or is ATRAC3 plus better than Type R? 3) I had read with older Sony's that the full range of equaliser options was only available with ATRAC files. Is this still the case? 4) if I only play MP3 files, will the battery time be significantly shortened? Sorry the long post and I would greatly appreciate any responses. Thanks a lot.