Terence Kelly

Well, I can only give my experience with 2 HD1's 2 HD3's and 1 HD5, all American units. None of them had audible cracking in the sound. The HD3 had relatively low volume for classical music and could not "image" the sound sharply. That sounds like what the original poster was complaining about. The HD5 gives me a good sound but its volume is lower than the HD1, but sufficiently high for comfortable listening. I can only turn the HD1 all the way up on really quiet passages otherwise it will take my ears off using a pair of Sennheiser PX100 headphones. Audible cracking might be a problem with the particular unit. The distortion I'm referring to is more subtle than that. Neither of the HD1s has the MP3 upgrade. I didn't want to risk them becoming like the HD3s. TK

Well, If you're used to minidisc I think you will find that the HD3 is a bit disappointing. I bought two for my daughters and found the HD3 fatiguing to listen to. I think it produced too much distortion at high volume levels and you had to have it up nearly all the way for classical music. I have since tried out an HD5 and an HD 1. HD5 is better than the HD3, but in terms of sound, Sony got it right the first time. The HD1 has higher volume and no noticeable distortion at max volume. If you can live without mp3 support you would really like it. It matches up fairly well with my Sharp DRS7 minidisc, which is the best sounding portable unit I've ever heard. TK

I have an older Sony flash player that I like a lot for music - the E107. It's convenient and sturdy and has good sound quality - but it's not very good at low bitrate mp3s - so called podcasts. It won't play the lower bitrates at all, and when I convert them to atrac, the fast forward option is way too slow to deal with half hour to hour length programming. I would like anyone who has a one of the newer players to comment on whether or not they will handle these mp3s natively and whether the fast forward function has more than one speed. On many Sony products, fast forwarding while paused will move ahead much faster, but there's no way that I know of to do that on my E107. Any information would be appreciated. --TK

While answering questions about ATRAC 352, does anyone know if the new Sony players will handle the lower sampling rates common in MP3 voice files? I like my older Sony Atrac/MP3 player but it won't handle those files and it's time consuming to import them into SS for conversion to atrac. TK