Right. Just had a thought and I was thinking it would be a good Idea that will save on all the "is this any good?" topics, and will be good for reference if anyone is thinking of buying something but wasn't sure if it was any good etc.....
Basically if you have bought a product that other people might be buying (electrical, pc, car products, books, anything really!) and you've had it long enough to give us all a decent idea of what it's like then come here and give a review in the following layout:
-Category: Electrical, Automotive, Hi-Fi, Musical, etc.....
-Product: Full name etc
-Time owned: Preferably a week at least
-Price: Pretty obvious
-Where bought: Location, store name, website and contact details
-Additional info (anything you thought might be useful)
-Review:
-Marks out of 5
A nice picture of the product, any accessories, and next to something so we can tell how big it is or whatever...
We could also have people requesting a review so just put
"Request: The product(s)" and then hopefully if it works out someone else will whack a review down to help you out.
I'll get the ball rolling....
Category: Electrical/MP3
Product: Sony NwHD-5
Time Owned: 8 days
Price: £199.99 for the player, £30 for the remote
Where bought: Sony centre in southampton, East street. Sony centres locator
Additional info: 20gb space, 1 year warranty, replaceable battery, optional remote, comes with case, charger and software.
Review:
I had been thinking about buying a decent Mp3 player for ages and looked into all the different ones available, obviously there's the I pod which is pretty mainstream now, the I river, the Creative Zen, and a few others. I had narrowed it down to either the I pod or the NwHD-5 simply due to reputation and sound quality. I eventually decided on the Sony because the sound quality was much better, battery life far above the competitors, and compression rates much more efficient (despite rubbish software which I'll go on about more later)
First impressions were good, it comes with plenty of bits like a soft case, headphones, charger, usb data lead, software, and full warranty cards/instruction manual. The good thing about the sony too is that it has an optional remote like the walkman cd players which you can get for £30 if bought with the player. The packaging claims 13,000 song storage which is a bit ambitious as that's at the lowest compression rate of 44kbps in Atrac 3 which I think no one will probably use. There are lots of compression options but I think the best is the Atrac3+ 64kbps which I couldn't tell the difference against the same song in 128 kbps. In this compression rate you'll fit about 7000 songs or so on. Plenty for most of us.
The first gripe I had with the player, is as everyone testifies, the shocking sonic stage software. It's quite frankly rubbish. I loaded it on to my pc, and found that I couldn't import tracks from a lan location and they had to be on my HDD. Ok fine, so 2 hours later and 26gb of music moved I started to import it all. That all went fine and was pretty quick on my 2.6 ghz amd pc. I then tried to move it all onto the player which was where the problems started. I tried the auto function first which in theory automatically detects songs not on the player and loads them on. I selected all tracks and started to load them on in 64kbps atrac3+. 2 seconds later and I had a error window, and sonic stage had to be shut down. I kept having this problem until I realized that Sonic stage doesn't replace the existing tracks once converted, it just copies them to a location on the pc in the new format, which since loading all my music to my HDD, I didn't have enough space to do.
After scratching my head for a bit I worked out that it could do it by converting say 10 albums at a time, deleting them from their converted location, doing ten more, etc etc......A long process but it got me their in the end. You have to make sure all songs are not read only though otherwise it won't convert them and freeze - This can be easily done though by going to the folder where all music is kept, and changing all files and folders so they aren't read only in the properties.
Once all the music was loaded on I went through, and deleted a few of the random doubles it created (not sure why) and made sure it was all V3 tagged properly or whatever and I was away. Just for reference, 6000 songs in atrac 3+ 64 and I still have 9gb left on the player (you only really have about 18.4 to start with after formatting etc.) First impressions on listening are that the provided headphones aren't great. This is the case with every one of the competitors though and to be fair, they are better than most, especially if you have a play with the e.q's available and I'm pretty happy with the sound now. There are loads on there which beats the Ipod hands down as they are all customizable etc....
Load times on the menus and everything are all good, and there are loads of neat functions on it such as the orient screen options and the backlight time. You also have a line out function which is great for plugging it into a stereo from the headphones, and theres the usual Sony options like AVLS and such like.
One of the first issues I noticed is that the volume is very quiet on full, which is because all EU products have to be restricted now due to the french laws which state a maximum volume on all personal walkmans. This however can be changed with a neat little hack which gets you into the engineers menu on the player, where you can turn the restriction off. After this it's plenty loud enough.
Play functions consist of shuffle, repeat, one track, and normal playback. You can also have playlists etc, which I haven't yet used. The claimed battery life of the Sony unit is 40 hours. After playing it for around 20 and battery still showing 2/3rds charge I can safely say it's a pretty fair guess on the stamina of the player. It also charges in 3 hours which is pretty great. The interface is easy to get used to and better laid out than the I pod in my opinion so full marks here. It's also nice and easy to see with the backlight (which you can invert) so there are no fundamental issues here.
I've been using the player on shuffle since I've had it and not had the same song once yet, and playback wise can't really fault it at all. There are pause and resume functions, a good hold button and skip track/scan track, skip folder etc etc. The remote is really good aswell and useful for changing through if the unit's in your bag and you want to skip though something :D The battery life dominates the I pod and also if the battery does break you can replace it yourself for 25quid, and theres no need to send it off to Apple and pay 80quid for a replacement. I think sony have really done well with this one and the only faults really are the below par Sonic stage software which to be fair, isn't that bad once you know how to work it well :P The compression is excellent and this is really where it comes into it's own. You can compress what would normally be a 6mb song into a third it's size and this obviously results in being able to have loads more music. Finally, you can also use it for portable storage by dragging and dropping from folder to disk.
Overall I'd give it a 4/5 and mark it down just on the software. A great, good looking player in all with enough functions to keep most people happy.
