oluv

have you ever tried koss porta pro? they are cheap, their design suck, but they sound quite cool! some might call them "bassheavy", but if you like a warm, boomy sound, you will like them too. and you will never use "bassboost" anymore! unfortunately they do not block outer noise at all, so you will have problems to listen with them in loud surrondings, and besides as they are opened, people near you will hear what you hear! sennheiser has the px100 which sounds very similar to the porta pro, you could have a look at these too. i didn't try the px200, but heard that the px100 should sound better than the px200, because the px200 is a completely different model, which is closed. as i was looking for some cheap alternative to my porta pros, i found the sony mdr-ex71sl, which are in-ear plugs and stay inside quite well. i like the sound, they are not that bassheavy, but have still a strong bass, and their heights seem a bit clearer than the ones of portapro. i am not sure if the ex71 woks good with the nh-900, as i realized, that the ex71 sounds different depending on the headphone-output. connected to my stereo it sounds quite soft, with full and rich bass. connected to my laptop it lacks bass and has pronounced heights and mids, but sounds also much louder. as the nh-900 uses a power-saving digital amp with 3mW output, i guess that the ex71 could sound "strange" with this. you should try maybe. there are other in-ear alternatives which are much more expensive though. shure, etymotics etc.

what is the strongest gumstick available for the 900? included is 900 mAh i think, but i saw them up to 1400. are there even ones with bigger capacity?

can anyone of the happy new owners tell me if the nh1 and the 900 or only one or the other are charged through usb as well? it is not the charging that is important for me, but more the ability to not discharge when connected to usb. thanks for an answer.

in order to have a listen to atrac3+ i downloaded sonicstage2.0 and ripped some tracks for comparison. first of all sonicstage is really clumsy, i had to fool around to find out how to simply convert tracks to atrac. and besides i have no idea why this stupid program has to use 36mb for installation. i don't like it at all! then i did some abx tests and i must say that atrac3 132kbps sounds better than 128 kbps mp3 files encoded with lame/best quality. it sounds different though. although atrac has some problems with fast attacks, mp3 distorts the frequency more. i have a sample of an old jean michel jarre recording that has always been a killer, which clearly shows that atrac delivers better sound-quality in this case, whereas mp3 sounds terrible. if someone is interested i could upload short wav-samples that demonstrate this. atrac3+ 256kbps is very near to linear pcm and doing blind abx tests it's sometimes not easy to distinguish atrac from the original. i would probably use atrac3+ 256kbps, but atrac3 132kbps files are nearly half that small, and the quality is not that bad at all. maybe i could consider even this one, because the difference to the original would be marginal with many recordings i have. i would also like to test if there is a difference between files encoded directly within the md-player and encoded within sonicstage. as conclusion i must say that the encoding quality depends a lot on the source. if i take modern recordings, that have a rich sound-spectrum with deep bass and exaggerated heights, these are more difficult to encode than more natural sounding recordings from the 70s or 80s, when they still didn't use exiters and enhancers and various sound-processing algorithms that excessively as nowadays. in these cases you won't even hear much difference between atrac3 132 and pcm.

thanks a lot for the replies. i think i will have to test out in the store if the nh900 is loud enough. and regarding atrac encoding: it didn't come to my mind that i can use sonicstage for this. i will try this out later, i am already quite curious about this. i was only a bit unsure, because i read some posting, where someone claimed that direct recording with the recorder through digital-in will sound better, than encoding with sonicstage. or is this only rumour? thanks and best regards!

i am planning to buy either a sony mz-nh900 or an I-Audio M3 mp3-player with 20GB. i already owned a 20GB mp3-player for 1 month, and wasn't very happy with it. it was a kind of no-name brand, so i had firmware crashes quite often, the max. battery-life were ridiculous 5 hours, and the display got terribly scratched after only 2 weeks of use and i had lots of problems with returning this kind of crap. now i was thinking if a hi-md player would be a nice alternative. i would have exchangable media, and exchangable battery with long battery-life, nice small design, and all the other features like, recording etc. The MZ-NH900 would be my first choice, because it is cheaper than the MZ-NH1 and i can use AA Batteries with the battery case as well. the problem of course is that i would have to encode my cds again. i was beginning to rip my favourite tunes and already have 7GB of mp3. i would need to carry around several minidiscs, to have the same amount of music, i would have with a 20g mp3-player. my other concern is the audio-quality of atrac. although i have already read many postings regarding this topic and most of people ensure that HI-SP is nearly transparent, i would still like to hear some short samples demonstrating the difference of linear pcm and HI-SP. i am usually listening to 192 or 256 kbps lame-encoded mp3-files and am very happy with it, and i assume HI-SP won't sound much worse, but i would like to hear this by myself. does anybody know if there are some short wav-files available that show the difference of atrac3+ audio and uncompressed music, maybe even in comparison to mp3 with the same 256kbps. if there is a link, it would be great to have a listen, as i didn't find anything until now. another thing that makes me think is the "digital amp". i am not sure if such one is really cool, as i already saw a posting that was claiming the NH1 to sound bad even with linear-pcm. and what about the 5mW output, or even 3mW for europe?! this is quite low i think. the mp3-player i had before had 50mW output and it was not too loud at all. i normally listened to 32-35 from 40. how loud does the NH900 sound? i also want to use the sony mdr-ex7, but i know that these sound much softer than my usual headphones. has anyone heard the output of the NH900, is it loud enough? i mean sony already invented this stupid AVLS that always drove me mad with my previous cassette-walkman, maybe they are trying to do the same by limiting the volume-output?! why the difference for american and european market with 5mW and 3mW?! i would be happy to read some opinion from a NH900 user, and maybe someone could share some short samples that compare atrac3+ with pcm or even compare the different atrac-modes. maybe someone could help and clear some things up and help me with my decision to either try hi-md or stick with mp3. many thanks! o.