bangraman

In everything software-related that Sony has done to date, they've indicated an almost complete lack of 'joined-up-thinking' that even other non-Apple companies have started to pick up. Quite apart from the fact that Sony have never been software masters, this problem also stems from an institutional thing within Sony. Departments frequently work against one another, not with. The right hand doesn't always talk ot the left, even in very high-profile projects. Despite the recent restructuring this hasn't changed much. Product managers who are key in generating enthusiasm and feedback in product development often come across as mere workers, not people who believe in what they do with almost evangelical zeal as at Apple. Product managers are often the people who'll point out or think of something crucial that takes a product just that bit further into a real killer. It wasn't always like this, but the managers who built Sony in the 90's won't understand the current climate either. That's part of the reason for Walkman's stumble in the '00's - they had a mix of old-timers whose opinions were no longer relevant, and new people who comprehend the situation a little better but treat the whole thing as just a job. As for who they listen to, they have some excellent advisers and for marketing feedback.... Sony has quite the retinue. It's just that, well, how can I put it, it all gets lost in translation, and I'm not talking about the English-Japanese divide. They still have some of the best engineers in the business and that's the only reason why Sony is still visible in the market but they're working with one hand tied behind their back, and I doubt that'll change anytime soon. And I doubt Chronicstage will suddenly morph either. Remember Connect? Eh? If it does, well colour me astonished and call me Betty. Sony, still, are the only ones *at the moment* capable of exceeding Apple's output by a comfortable margin if only they joined up their thinking on all fronts. Couple more years without severe change though and I'm fairly certain Samsung / iRiver will have overtaken Sony in every way - style, quality, and definitely platform usability.

Just wondering, If you have tips, list'em here please.

Strangely I get more white noise with the A808 with varying combos of IEM's than with any other player in my possession right now. On balance I'd say it's one of the hissier ones out there. It's not really the white noise though that's the issue. And clearly we must be looking at different lab results. I wrote a post on Head-Fi recently entitled "How do you compare your players?" and I fully expect it to sink without a trace within a few days, as I believe a miniscule percentage of people who profess opinions on portables actually compares the players in a truly level, head-to-head manner, and that most of the people out there aren't really interested in doing anything beyond pressing home the validity of their gut reactions or peer opinions. But try it - and it might surprise you. I'm hoping that if I run Chronicstage on it's own machine, then I'm in a better position to pinpoint where things may be not working or where it might be slowing down and solve execution issues that way. Either way, the sound quality of the A808 is not a standout and that is not why I'm making this relatively herculean effort to smooth my path to Chronicstage. It is simply the nicest player out there, it gives me geek joy as well as working better than any other machine bearing an NW prefix to date. That's not saying much to be honest, but the A808 is a player I actually want to use despite Chronic. And this is a first, ladies and gents.

Allrightythen, Specs have crept up a bit since a visitation to my 'where parts go to zzzzz' cabinet. I rang the guys I usually buy parts from and got a pretty good deal for an E6700 (since no 6600 in stock), 2Gb of PC5300 and the Raptor / Seagate. No intel board in stock, but they did offer me a P5B quite cheap. This is a really nice board and I was mulling over this deal in that I'd have to find a GPU... ... Until a look in the cabinet yielded a couple of spare 8800GTXs, which I believe ought to be sufficient even for Chronicstage. One 8800 then. This is kind of a waste but it saves me having to buy another card. The cabinet also yielded the Enermax PSU and the Antec P180 case, plus two rather ancient-looking Liteon DVD+-RW's... never mind, I won't be ripping on this machine. I was also experimenting with one of my Vista Business laptops which has never seen a single media application so far... and with a 4Gb library, Chronic was going smoother than my desktop despite this lappy only having a Core 2 Duo 2.16. So clearly Vista presents CS with no (overt) problems, but is hampered by other media software resident on the system for one reason or another. All the more reason I think for building a "ChronicStation". In the light of fairly painless operation with Vista I've decided to go with Ultimate first, downgrading to XP if I have problems. A tad over-spec perhaps, but Chronicstage certainly has no excuse now for not working on the computer. So there it is, folks. Separate drives for library and Chronic to run off, a reasonable spec throughout, dedicated to Chronic to start with. We'll see how this goes. Thanks for the pointers, especially the helpful tips via PM. I'll keep you updated whether this reduces my Chronicstage frustrations any.

RAID1 involves an overhead and I'm not keen on doing that in software. The difference between RAID 0 and 1 by the way is that in 0, data is striped across the drives (which don't individually max out the SATA bus) which means that the cumulative data throughput of the array increases when compared to a single drive. There is obviously no redundancy in a RAID0 array but you do it for performance. RAID 1 is when the same information is written to two drives. This provides no performance increase - in fact, it results in a decrease especially when handled without a dedicated controller. Since I said reasonable performance was what I was going for and redundancy wasn't mentioned at all I'm not entirely sure why RAID1 was brought up. I do keep backups of my library on a NAS and that is a separate issue.

I meant actually on the player the socket. Take a look inside to see if you can see any corrosion. I said jack didn't I? Silly me.

Without doubt the Sony pack-ins for these players are probably the best ever bundled with a player... ...but this is a bit like saying "Without doubt the choice of Latvian supercars is the best ever this year". i.e. It's not a big deal. You can still definitely do better in terms of sound quality depending on your usage patterns, and in most situations the better isolating in-ear monitors will also do a better job than the NC pack-ins in terms of noise blocking.

The gold is there so that the plug's exterior doesn't corrode and result in crackling in the headphones. However it may be that you don't have gold-plated contacts on your headphone jack (or if you have used it for a long time, it could be that the plating has eroded off), which in turn may be corroded. This might leave a 'smoke' pattern on your headphone plug. You could take a peek at the contacts of your headphone socket using a flashlight and check for signs of corrosion.

One could say that ease of loading and the flexibility of loading and playlisting that the iPod offers is one of the key aspects of 'it's about the music'. For me it certainly overrules a superior Equaliser (not superior sound quality as in the testing I've done the Sonys don't offer it in comparison to the iPod), especially as I use superior headgear which doesn't rely on EQ for decent sound. I love Sony gear because I'm a geek and they give me geek love. I pick up the MZ-RH1 for example and my inner geek gets a warm glow, as it does with the A808. However I find them unusable as a software/hardware package which is the only way in which I evaluate players especially if you're tied to one loading software. Thanks to Chronicstage it's definitely not about the music - whereas due to the way that iTunes/iPod works, the iPod is all about the music. I just get no geek love from the iPod.

The suggestion I got from one member was that I should run Chronic and my library on separate drives... so the Raptor & Seagate combo. I have a couple of unused Antec P180's and I also have a few PSU's spare and I know drive cooling isn't an issue with that combo, but I was thinking about picking up a P150 case + PSU for this use and I'm not sure how well that cools two drives. Although I'd have to say if it's an assumption of heat based on the rotation speed, the 15,000rpm SAS drives which virtually all my Dell Precisions are equipped with runs fairly cool (although they make an almighty racket during reads / writes) given proper airflow, which as far as I know even the P150 manages. The Intel MB in question is fairly cheap as is the processor, memorywise I'd be more comfortable with 2Gb in any case, and then it's just the drives. No individual OS cost as I'm a corporate in terms of my M$ buying habits. I think I might have spare opticals. I haven't got a quote off my regular supplier but the total cost based on the current parts pick would be pretty much what I had in mind. If I haven't missed any Chronic gotchas, I'm placing the order on Monday.

It's more or less exactly what you felt. WMA is the worst by quite an audible margin, AAC is generally good throughout, ATRAC3+ is excellent at lower bitrates where quality isn't such an issue but you just want something actually listenable. But it's advantage tails off at higher bitrates as it continues to paint a slight caricature of the original material.

A recent call to Sony support for the hell of it produced the following howler, which really sums it up best for what sort of person Chronicstage is best suited for. In response to my question "But for example, even Windows Media Player doesn't seem to have these issues" the answer was "Well you see sir, Windows Media Player is for professional use. Sonicstage is for consumers." In other words, it's for people who don't know any better. And it's a tool designed by nerds who're not only borderline incompetent but patronising the user base too. The sad thing is, there are people defending this POS. The same thing could be said about the much-overstated superior sound 'quality' of course, given the similar or lower fidelity and the higher instances of hiss with various quality IEM's in comparison to other competing players from Apple, Samsung et al. Sony almost always does EQ right... but it means slathering syrup topping onto a pancake base that's not quite as good as others. Me, I usually like my pancakes dry and for that reason, I don't rate the Sony as a leader in the pack. If I want decent core sound and the ability to excessively flavour it at my discretion, I'd probably go for the Cowon D2.

Reason I'm not going with a prebuilt of course is - no preloads, I'll start with 'virgin' Windows. I'll go XP, that's fine. Thanks for the responses via PM too. OK - what I have in mind is a low-end Core 2 Duo, say the E6600. Add that to a MATX board with built-in video like Intel's DQ965GF. 2Gb. WD Raptor 10K 150Gb boot, Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 750GB for data. What say you?

The way that ATRAC Lossless works is unique among the 'majors' and the most sensible out of the lot in a portable / home mix situation. No-one (except the rabid head-fiers who believe they can tell the difference with a pair of balanced-armature IEM's on the move) is actually going to cart Lossless around on a portable. AL allows for the Lossless information to stay on desktops and for lossy data to be loaded onto a portable - all while managing just one library. The problem with the current implementation is of course that it is centered around Chronicstage - which has no advanced audio routing options for a start. Other lossless codecs have a fundamental problem in that if you actually want to take music portable, you have to compromise on the size / battery life / etc issues that lossless formats bring, or to effectively manage two libraries. I found that impossible to do. Now the way I used to do it until very recently - and this is no joke - is to use a multicore PC to run multiple instances of LAME to transcode FLAC to MP3 on the fly. Fortunately, my very slow developer has finally come through with a piece of idleware to transcode the main FLAC library to MP3 in the idle time of the HTPC and dump the results into a mirrored shadow library. The important final addition being that tag changes and track deletions / changes are also mirrored without fail. Development work on the above has not only required the acquisition of quad / octocore workstations for the interim brute-force solutions, but also in the development time and money invested. I bought a laptop for the developer as part of the deal, and the balance of the deal will be heading his way once work is complete. All this is happening just so that I can maintain a Lossless library and manage only that one, while simultaneously allowing lossy copies to be kept. ATRAC Lossless removes the complications of the above in one fell swoop. It's just that as it stands, it is unusable thanks to Chronic. Opening up development to third parties of the benefits of AL implementation would be a huge boost as far as I'm concerned - and perhaps for many people who take the quality of music at home seriously, but would prefer the enjoy the full mobility benefits of lossy audio on the move. It will also of course eliminate the dependency on Chronicstage which is as of recently the only real impediment to the larger-scale adoption of Sony players.

Budget: As little as possible, while allowing Chronicstage to run properly - or at least, as properly as possible. The RAID array on the Precision which I tried Chronic on before this didn't actually make much difference in terms of application response, so I guess I'll be sticking with a single drive - or a dual RAID0 stripe at the most. Anything else I'll be doing will be less resource-intensive, more efficient and better performing (iTunes, iRiver Poo2, j.River Media Center, etc) than Chronicstage, so to all practical intents and purposes I am building this machine specifically for Chronic, and other apps will be loaded later once I'm happy that Chronic more or less works.

It's an odd question, but I'm building a 'syncer' machine, especially in the light of problems I've had with Chronicstage which vary from machine to machine. Some of it is clearly performance issues, others could be down to other (necessary, since all my machines are fairly pared down in terms of what's loaded) resident software interfering with Chronicstage. So I've decided to start from scratch, a self-built with a clean slate. This machine's first use will be with Chronicstage. I will also put iTunes and j.River Media Center on there a short while later. Again in light of the problems I've had with network stored files and Chronic, it'll be working off it's own hard disk(s, if necessary) to store music, so we're looking at a minimum of 400Gb capacity. It is highly unlikely to be doing anything else in it's lifetime. What should I build (new parts)? Should I go Vista or XP?

I think I peed my pants laughing.

Cast your doubts aside. I own both (and more). Many players can match or beat the Sonys these days. More than that though, I think the iRiver is a better package than the Sony. The Sony's better made and there is more attention to detail in some areas of the machine, but the iRiver pretty much has it all... ease of use, considerably easier / more flexible to load, respectable specs and decent SQ. As far as my personal experiences go, you're far more likely to find the Clix2 a bigger part of your everyday listening life than the Sony. But that's not to say the Sony is not a helluva neat machine, because it is. It's just that the iRiver has the overall usage thing sorted out better partly because it doesn't use Chronicstage.

All of 'em. (Although I'm quite tempted to say "I'm done" with an 80Gb iPod and Cowon D2.)

You could also check out the M-Audio DX4. No lookers to compare with the soundsticks, but performance befits their intention as entry-level studio monitors. http://www.m-audio.com/products/en_us/DX4-main.html

What they need to do is to make ATRAC licenseable for a reasonable fee, or even make it a conditional-free / fee license. It's a superior format in many ways - who else out there has anything like ATRAC Lossless? No-one. It's just that Chronicstage makes all this goodness unusable. Give it some independent software support. They've got some of the best players they've ever done right now and all they need to do is to make it a little more accessible for third-party developers. I'm not holding my breath of course, but it's a hope... e.g. NW-series + Playcounts + Media Center = iPod cremator.

A not-fully-effective-but-might-work-to-a-sufficient-level (phew) method is to use an air duster. Most air dusters have an extension tube that will fit into the headphone socket of any player, including the E005. Give it a quick blast and any crud excessively obscuring your view may go away. I provide that info with the usual disclaimers, etc

The supplied earphones don't isolate, so what you're experiencing is probably trying to turn up the phones to overpower the background noise. I find that my UK-spec A80x is more than loud enough with efficient earphones, and as such I think you may be pushing the player to an unhealthy level of noise. The best thing you could do is to get yourself a somewhat isolated set of earphones... or accept that you'll have background music while jogging, not in the foreground.

Tried ripping the CD in something else to MP3? iTunes? However I don't see what you're so surprised about. The Walkman division has been doing the same thing for the last 5 years... releasing beautiful looking gear that doesn't work very well.

Taut bass for example is something I can't place as an attribute of the PX200. But yeah... we're getting into advanced nitpicking.