I have had the nw-a55 for about 6 weeks now. I started running mountains as my main form of exercise and that mandated a lightweight DAP. I wanted good battery life, small and absolutely positively without android. I did about a day of hectic research and yeah the Sony was clearly the only one I was interested in despite its heavy pricetag.
First thing is first. This thing has the best build quality of any consumer device I have ever owned. You will see that Sony has a very strong reputation online for their expertise in industrial design (Sony tends to be hit and miss with a lot of their products, but this is the one area they really excel seemingly) and when you are holding the thing there is no surprise why. I was holding and admiring it a couple weeks ago, getting these very nostalgic feels and then it hit me. This thing has all the hallmarks of those luxury consumer electronic devices back in the day, such as those gold plated casio calculators or one of those watches. At their time those items were very simple, the form matched the function and they were devices you owned, at least feeling as if you had something of inherent value due to the sheer beauty of design and quality of construction. The technology of screens, audio hardware, storage, battery life have converged to meet with the pinnacle of industrial design, to provide us with something like the aforementioned products that stood on the merits of its form or function alone. In an age full of 'disposable' smartphones with cheap flimsy screens and questionable toughness, this product looks down at such uninspired devices pityingly. It is obvious from holding this device, it does not want to be forgotten. You will want this device in 10 years as much as you want it today, in my very honest opinion.
The sound is good and blows my iphone 6s out of the water. I use Koss Porta pros with it FWIW. What I assumed was a messy albeit good headphone turned in this refined beauty with this DAP. However there are some misconceptions I want to clear up. Firstly, if you are someone who requires a true line out from your DAP, this probably isn't the one for you. Yes you can get the Walkman to RCA/3.5mm out however, it has been suspected for some time that this still does not provide a 'true' line-out signal that has been untainted by the amplifying unit of the DAP. So yeah, that is the first thing, it is likely whatever signal you are getting out using these 'line-out' devices are just as tampered with as the signal that would be coming directly from the headphone out. Secondly, Sony only supports propietry data out with another variant of their walkman cable, so should you want to go down that route you will be limited to using Sony's ridiculously expensive dedicated amps, which basically turn your device into a glorified hardrive given the DAC duties are also offloaded to the Sony amp.
. Copy your music, and try to format your sd card. My card worked well :3
