[hifiboom]

today I got my new W880i walkman phone and seriously combined with AAC or WMA or even WAV files and my fontopia 888 ear cans (which are okay but nor the best) it sounds brilliant. (using the internal EQ for finetuning)

I have had a sony D-NE20 walkman, a D-211, a D-121 and others.

The sony phone walkman sounds way better than the D-NE20(which had a digital amp that sounded like plastic crap).

Listening to the W880 makes fun again, its not perfect audiophile but at least a well thought feature and the battery seems powerful too, delivering long playing times.
not as good as the D-211 yet still very useable and the volume availble is quite good too, without much distortion at higher volume.


I guess with better ear cans the performance of the W880 would be even better.

I have heard the ipod shuffle from my neighbour one year ago and from my imagination the sound of the W880 is superior to the one of the ipod.

I`m prettsy impressed.

BTW its a nice handy if you are not a heavy SMS user like me.

maybe I`ll write a short review soon, these are my first impressions.

 

[412]

How's the player interface? My two-year-old K750 is nothing but bare necessities.

 

[hifiboom]

the interface itself is so-so.

I mean it shows track name and time and everything works fine.

But the sorting is somewhat ill.
the phone seems to mix all subfolders into one main thing.

To me it seems like this phone sorts the music after the id3 tags.

so most of them fall into unknown interprets

lol
not perfect.
navigation in a track is quite fine, switching tracks is easy and fine.
another fine gimmick, there is abutton on the left side, where you can switch quickly into walkman mode and back.

I really don`t care, there is one gig memory so yo won`t be able to load 1000s of tracks onto the phone.


One cd in 128kbit wma is ~60mb, so its about to hold 10-15 cds.

 

[hifiboom]

another add_note:
file compression format seems very important for resulting soundquality of this walkman:

WAV files sound perfect
AAC mp4 compressed music sounds 98% close to WAV

MP3 and WMA files sound worse quality.
a large step down in quality.

So I wouldn`t recommend using AAC format as a good compromise between space and SQ.

I noticed similar phenomena with the D-NE20, where ATRAC compression sounded way better than mp3 and wma, imo.

 

[potatoe]

sony walkman phones are pretty good. just love my w850. i stopped carrying around my ipod since i got the phone. tho the interface and pc application could use some work.

 

[hifiboom]

yeah it sounds pretty good and i am pretty happy with my purchase.

It has a sound comparable to the early sony discmans. In the upper range its better than my D-121.
When megaBass is activated the D-121 has a fuller and a bit deeper sound.
Without Megabass the W880 sounds better in most areas.
It has to be said that the D-121 isn`t perfect too.

I found out it plays mp3 fine depending on compreesion type. I am not yet sure maybe its VBR that makes problems with the decompressing.

I have some 192kbit mp3 on the phone that sound very good too.