(IMPORTANT go onto my second part of this review where I slam the player ) 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: Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Click for large Any questions or anything, please ask and I’ll answer if poss. (this review cross posted to my blog)
