lyris

My guess is that they'd help you out, but charge you for return shipping costs to Japan.

eBay

I think that the problems with OLED are only related to OLED TVs (which is why you can't buy any yet). The blue component of these seems to fail quickly. Since the OLEDs in the players are monochrome (right?), I don't think you have anything to worry about.

Yes, that's a hard disk problem. I'm not sure if the disk can be repaired. However, I think I may be able to find you a perfectly good 20gb drive that came out of an HD5 that had a broken headphone output if you're interested in spare parts...

Haven't tried PSP videos but yes, the "iPod" versions of video podcasts work directly on the NW-A800 without transcoding.

Sonyslave, what does the text on the back of yours say under the "MADE IN CHINA" line and above the "Li-ion" logo? Mine's in Japanese and I've been wondering what it means.

Yes, tell us what you think. I'm listening to my [Japanese] one right now and LOVE it

Glad to see it's coming out in North America. I'm in the UK and bought mine from Japan but most people are scared of imports. I also love the "Disappointed when your battery dies" mention. Subtle. Why do none of the Sony sites promote the hell out of the fact that it comes with $105 value headphones?

Shinji, do you use the Equaliser function on your NW-A808? If so, have you heard the slight scratching it sometimes produces in quiet parts of the sound? I uploaded a 1.2mb WAV file of it here, I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear what I'm talking about or not: http://lyrisfiles.landofwhimsy.com/nwa808_odd.wav Absolutely delighted with the quality of the sound even with that slight problem though

WOW. Just got mine today and I am VERY impressed by the sound quality and build! For those interested I posted a mini review with pictures on my web site. http://www.lyris-lite.net/2007/03/sony_nwa...go_get_one.html

Yeah, eBay is a much cheaper idea. I'll leave it a few days so I'm not competing against you and bidding the thing up!

That's what's confusing me as well. Are the buttons actually "built in" to the shell? The shell costs 49.25 UK pounds, or $88 US to replace (I called the UK and US Sony Spare Parts centers). Does anyone know if I bought a new shell, would it com with the cable already attached to the button part?

I've done the exact same thing. I managed to mangle the flex cable when I was sliding the main body back in. Can anyone help us?

Wow, this is a versatile little player. Thanks again for the advice!

Excellent ! Thanks for the answer! So, these can all be played natively: ATRAC3 ATRAC3Plus ATRAC Advanced Lossless MP3 And these need to be transcoded by SonicStage: AAC WMA WAV / AIFF / Linear PCM Or, can it even play AAC and WMA natively (so long as the files are without DRM)?

I just ordered an NW-A808 B from Japan I hope it arrives soon! It's going to replace my old Sony NW-HD5 which is having LCD screen problems. Luckily, I never used much space on my HD5, so going down to 8gb from 20gb won't be a problem for me - so long as the sound quality's as good as the reviews say it is! I have a question - the ATRAC Advanced Lossless tracks I make from my CDs using SonicStage - can the NW-A808 play these natively or does SonicStage transfer a lossy version for playback (like it did with the NW-HD5?)

I can only talk about my experience with the iPod products so here goes. I was first looking for an MP3 player in late 2004 and ended up buying an Ipod. Back then, they were using 4th generation models, so that's what I got. When I first heard the player, I was underwhelmed. The premium price tag and impression I had got from other users - I just wasn't hearing the results. I bought better headphones than the ones I was already using (not the in box ones, those were unusable) but was still upset with the sound quality. Anything with bass would "crunch up" and distort which made listening to a lot of music subconsciously unpleasant to me. This wasn't all heavy bass stuff - sometimes even relatively light effects would produce nasty distortion. The problem is, I was getting bass distortion despite the fact that the bass was weak sounding already! The Apple elite told me, "You must be using bad headphones". The headphones were of great quality (Etymotic er6i) and sounded great on everything else - the Ipod was to blame! The analog audio output of the players just isn't good enough. It's puny and lifeless. Eventually I felt ashamed to actually own the Ipod. I felt like a complete and utter sucker for being fooled by their advertising. The almost total market dominance of the Ipod had fooled me into somehow believing that other manufacturer's players were flawed to the point of not being worth considering. The Sony players are flawed - they require the use of annoying software (SonicStage) but that's really the only slight annoyance I can think of. I think about it this way. It takes almost no time at all to transfer music to the player (even using Sonicstage ). Even if the software is annoying to use, you spend a lot more time listening to the excellent sound that most of the Sony players produce so you soon forget any software annoyances. Back to the Ipod. I got sick of the thing freezing up and eventually eBayed it, and bought a Sony Network Walkman (NW-HD5) the next week. It sounds a HELL OF A LOT better. The only down side is that there's a slight hiss over the audio output, but other than that, I really can't fault it for what it is - a damn good sounding portable player. The Ipod fans tell me that the problem has been solved with new Ipods, but I listened to my friend's new one and it sounded just as bad. HomeTheaterHiFi.com have graphical evidence of the bass distortion problem from one of the new models - see this blog post which contains a link: http://www.lyris-lite.net/2007/03/im_not_t...on_who_hat.html All in all, I can't say if they're THE best audio players around, but I am very happy with the Sony ones. The sound quality really makes me smile. Ask yourself this: if the sound quality wasn't good, do you think we would be putting up with Sonicstage? (Interesting note: remember how I said i eBayed the Ipod? Well, a week after selling it, the buyer contacted me and told me that it had broken and would no longer turn on. Fortunately, this was only 5-6 months in to its warranty so he was able to get it repaired).