what really annoys me is that sony already made a almost perfect player once,
Maybe im romantizicing it but the NW-HD5 was perfect, the sound quality was great (well... a bit dark), it had a amp bypass option that turned off the main amp so you can convert the headphone out to a line out, it had a normal standard usb plug for charging and data, 20-30h battery life with removable battery, portable hard drive function, the only major flaw was that for lossless you had to use atrac 3 and the social disease equivalent of a music managment software (music match is one of the WORST music loading and managment programs ever),
I think if sony made something similar today, no video playback, no graphical BS, only audio with 32gb memory, standard usb plug, good audio quality with a wolfson or AKM dac, amp shutoff option or switch to turn the HP out to line out, replaceable battery, and no WM port. make it UMS + MTP.
I dont want to watch movies on it, i dont want another cable plugged to my systen, i dont want to run out of juice while traveling and find that my WM-Port cable is still plugged to my PC at home.
I want good sound quality, at least 20 hours battery life, being able to charge it with the same charger i use for my phone and tablet and not to have to do voodoo to load files or convert them to a format the player can read.
***, sony invented the walkman, they didnt insist that you have special proprietary sony tapes with it, or use special sony batteries on it, it ran with standard audio tapes and used standard AA batteries.
Could you imagen todays sony making the 1970´s walkman ? they are like that wild kid that was wild in school and went to every party, made the walkman and fought the MPAA in court over the VCR, and then grew up to be a copyright lawyer...
Lets look at the Ipod´s major economical rival, im not talking feature equivalent, im not talking direct rival, im talking when the avarage person goes and buys a mp3 player that isnt an ipod and why is that.
Sansa clip zip... why ? its simple to use, it has good sound quality, its cheap (not one of our priorities here), no special cables, no special software, you just dump your music inside and it works, it uses a standard micro USB so you can charge it everywhere...
SONY needs that, they need to prove "we can still make a good, amazing sound quality, no ******** player" no WM port, no crappy software to load your music, no stupid features that make you watch movies on a 320x240 screen, just a good dap with good sound quality and resonable features (i guess some people want podcast support)
