[CosmicHolyGhost]

  Relevant to the conversation - there seems to be that new 128G Sony DAP that appears to be doing things right, or at the very least, a little bit better.
 
See what we want is not impossible. They just have to know that we want it. Instead of buying things that make it seem like we want what they thought we wanted when in reality we didn't want it, not at all. 

hm.. only costs 3 times more than the price of DX50..... only if lucky enough to buy it in Japan.. not sure how relevant it is to compare it with DX50 really...

 

[TwinQY]

  Well not really TwinQY. The fact that is has no expandable memory kills it right on the spot. Yes 128 G is still a lot of space. But not really for an audiophile DAP that is meant to play FLAC and 24 bit material. 128 GB is nothing really. Now with 128 GB onboard as well as a micro SD slot (which is not hard to implement at all and would add very minimal increase to the total cost of the product) would indeed warrant this as an excellent option. But they shot themselves in the foot here. Not sure why but they keep repeating the same mistake and the player won't take off in my book due to the limitation. Now apple can get away with it because it's apple. They have the fan base and people are ingrained into their ways. I can't say the same about Sony. They lost the market a long time ago and never got it back. With decisions like this they never will.

I don't know about you - but indexing a library on SD is slow. Molasses slow. There's really not a lot of way of getting around it unless you've got a full-on SDXC, no micro (in which case that would be fantastic - although not a lot of people doing it). I'd rather have onboard NAND by itself - although adding sd wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't really matter - and the thing is that most people report great things with indexing on the old Walkmans. So there is a method to the madness - and really, do people not complain about the Classic not having SD because it's Apple, or because most of us probably won't need it since there's f-ing 240GB on it? I'm not defending them - because there really is no excuse, you're right -  but it seems that just this one thing seems to be rather benign.
 
I think the main point that this thread bases itself on is the fact that things at their current state are not usable. The Sony appears to be usable and make an attempt to sound good. But only time will tell. There might be a few nitpicks but at least there's some looking towards a better direction.

 

[TwinQY]

  hm.. only costs 3 times more than the price of DX50..... only if lucky enough to buy it in Japan.. not sure how relevant it is to compare it with DX50 really...

There's a cheaper version, while less focused on the sound - and the downfalls of the no-expandable-storage kicks in.
 
The point is really that the idea, the concept of the product exists and has been executed, and you can sort of point to that for examples of better implementation.

 

[bcarr112281]

Relevant to the conversation - there seems to be that new 128G Sony DAP that appears to be doing things right, or at the very least, a little bit better.

How can we be certain until the device is released? Indeed, even if it works well, the sound quality might not be up to par.

 

[DigitalFreak]

   
I thought this for a while about the DX100, but got sick of the updates fixing one thing but breaking another. 
 
For whomever asked, I think I got up to about 1.2.7 when I sold mine. Then the new owner complained that there was dust under the screen! I refunded the guy, got it back, disassembled it and cleaned it and re-sold it. There shouldn't be dust under the screen of a new product! I think though that when an item becomes popular the companies can start to rush and cut corners. Little Dot did this when they became popular, with items received in cosmetically poor condition. At least in both cases the companies are good about responding to customer issues.
 
Something I want to add: The comments people have made have been very interesting. There are no really "wrong" points of view -- looking at each of the thoughts people have had is good for getting a bigger picture of what is really going on and why we have the problems we do with products. I have been using Apple products since the Apple II and I see a similar tolerance of problems as I saw with people in the Windows world (and Mac to a degree too). Also the world of mobiles. I owned a couple of Moto Razrs and, as attractive as the designs were, the software was abysmal. It is no wonder Apple came in and took over the market -- the widespread mediocrity was ripe for a big change. I think the same thing is possible here.

 
It's very possible. Matter of fact I think whatever company finally listens and comes out with a DAP that has hi-fi sound coupled with a great user experience will storm the market and force a lot of companies out. As it is the only reason some of these companies are continuing to sell product is because people think there isn't anything better out there so they continue to put up with mediocre like user experience.

 

[Nanatin]

I can understand where you are coming from in this respects. With 10,000 mp3 files or more it would definitely take a long time to boot up on each restart. In that regards it is very stupid. Since the player already builds a data base on the initial scan I see no reason for it to have to do that extra scan at each start up as it is redundant. But in my case since I use all WAV and use to use FLAC, it take me less than 40 seconds each start up due to having 750 or less files on each card. It actually took about 45 seconds to boot up a 64 GB card with about 2000 flac files. Or it might have been around 1700. Not sure now. But since I've done a mod to the firmware it has slightly increased the boot times but the overall sound is better.

Pls tell us more about the mod!

 

[gamefreak054]

Personally I have been enjoying my DX100 (v 1.4.2) a lot more than my Ipod Classic in UI and sound. I understand peoples gripes with the DX100 but they have been pretty small to me. Yes I will agree that the UI is pretty smooth for the Ipod however I had a lot of irritating experiences with my ipod. Some of the bigger ones being losing 80gb of stored music in my ipod, because Itunes crashed while it was syncing. Then I also had charging problems randomly. Sometimes it would only charge when connected to my PC, and not from the wall. Itunes sometimes only transfers half of a song when transferring multiple albums. Every once in a while the ipod HDD would completely freeze up. Also the Ipod HDD was so slow it could not keep up with my .wav files so it would skip in the middle of the song.
 
Personally I would much prefer to put up with the small gripes of my DX100 than the experience ruining gripes with my ipod. The only complaints with my DX100 so far is the UI is a little tricky at first, and I cant just hand it off to a friend to play music, and the media syncing is a bit slow after a boot up/ removing from PC. 
 
I have yet to come across the perfect running DAP, the closest so far has been my rockboxed clip zip. 

 

[estreeter]

I'll give the Theorem 720 DAC (or whatever Cypher Labs come up with in 2014) a shot next year. For all the bitching about Apple, the iDevices I've owned have had one major saving grace : the UI does what I expect it to when I press a button or slide my finger across an icon. I've also had good results with Sony, another brand that gets slammed here. In reliability terms, I think a lot of it comes down to the luck of the draw when you have factories pumping out batches of several hundred thousand at a time. iTunes is a whole other story, but on balance I'll be happier spending my money on another iPod Classic and the Theorem if Jude's review is anything to go by.

Ultimately, it would be fantastic to be able to rely on nothing more expensive than my Clip+ or 4G iTouch, but I will be spending a lot of time overseas in 2014, including trips to Tokyo and Seoul. Talk about the fat kid in the patisserie

 

[Currawong]

  I don't know about you - but indexing a library on SD is slow. Molasses slow. There's really not a lot of way of getting around it unless you've got a full-on SDXC, no micro (in which case that would be fantastic - although not a lot of people doing it). I'd rather have onboard NAND by itself - although adding sd wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't really matter - and the thing is that most people report great things with indexing on the old Walkmans. So there is a method to the madness - and really, do people not complain about the Classic not having SD because it's Apple, or because most of us probably won't need it since there's f-ing 240GB on it? I'm not defending them - because there really is no excuse, you're right -  but it seems that just this one thing seems to be rather benign.
 
I think the main point that this thread bases itself on is the fact that things at their current state are not usable. The Sony appears to be usable and make an attempt to sound good. But only time will tell. There might be a few nitpicks but at least there's some looking towards a better direction.

 
This is a good point I reckon. With the AK100, you can turn off library scanning and just do it manually each time you update and don't mind waiting (such as before going out when it would be irritating). I wonder if that is why Sony has done it, or because having another slot which can be broken by customers is undesirable (and these things are a huge deal with the big manufacturers who pay an arm and a leg to deal with customer support).

 

[lee730]

  I don't know about you - but indexing a library on SD is slow. Molasses slow. There's really not a lot of way of getting around it unless you've got a full-on SDXC, no micro (in which case that would be fantastic - although not a lot of people doing it). I'd rather have on-board NAND by itself - although adding sd wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't really matter - and the thing is that most people report great things with indexing on the old Walkmans. So there is a method to the madness - and really, do people not complain about the Classic not having SD because it's Apple, or because most of us probably won't need it since there's f-ing 240GB on it? I'm not defending them - because there really is no excuse, you're right -  but it seems that just this one thing seems to be rather benign.
 
I think the main point that this thread bases itself on is the fact that things at their current state are not usable. The Sony appears to be usable and make an attempt to sound good. But only time will tell. There might be a few nitpicks but at least there's some looking towards a better direction.

 
TwinQY what DAPs have you been using? lol. I had 192 GBs on my AK120 pretty much filled. It only took 16 seconds to boot the device. Now if I did a scan it would take a few minutes to finish the scan. But that is a one time deal and you have the option to disable automatic scan. So it does not take a long time to index the files. My Studio would take about 3 minutes if not a bit more on the first scan to index the files. After that about 35 seconds to start the player. So it's a non-issue really. There are workarounds that don't require a lot of time to do scans. Also having clean ID tags should minimize issues. That also goes for Sansas and Apple products. Tags issues are a universal thing. One reason why I am super anal about my library and archival.
 
While I have to agree the Sony player would technically still be usable. But with that limited space the usability is not feasible. So in that I disagree. Because I'd have to delete files and put on other albums to accommodate for this wasting my time while instead I could just have the ability to use micro SD cards to fix that issue. Giving me unlimited storage. So in my book there is no excuse for this. Especially if the player is marketed as an audiophile player with high resolution playback. High resolution files take up a crap load of room and 128 GBs can be filled in now time with such files. Pretty much I see no excuse in their decision to not include a micro SD slot. That would have sold many more units IMO. Limiting the memory is a form of controlling your customers and limiting the user experience. I am never for this.

 

[TwinQY]

  TwinQY what DAPs have you been using? lol. I had 192 GBs on my AK120 pretty much filled. It only took 16 seconds to boot the device. Now if I did a scan it would take a few minutes to finish the scan. But that is a one time deal and you have the option to disable automatic scan. So it does not take a long time to index the files. My Studio would take about 3 minutes if not a bit more on the first scan to index the files. After that about 35 seconds to start the player. So it's a non-issue really. There are workarounds that don't require a lot of time to do scans. Also have cleans ID tags and that should minimize any issues at all. That also goes for Sansas and Apple products. Tags issues are a universal thing. One reason why I am super anal about my library and archival.

Funnily enough I got a loan for the AK100 months back after hearing it at a meet and loving the form factor. Have had a lot of troubles with the indexing (a mere 100GB mind you). This and a couple of other DAP have got me a bit disenfranchised on the whole ordeal - if I had to pay for them (well I did for the Colorflys) I don't know what I would have done. 
 
Funnily enough my Clip Zip starts up in 5-6 seconds and indexes a 4GB SD card like molasses. While the internal 4GB take 10-15 seconds to scan. Don't make me talk about the 64GB sd card...usually I have the artist and title, genres and etc be damned. Beets and Musicbrainz has decent options especially when you turn the cruft off.
 
But enough about my dilemmas. I'm just impatient that way. We are talking about usability, to put it in perspective - everyone will have their preferences about that sort of stuff.

 

[lee730]

  Funnily enough I got a loan for the AK100 months back after hearing it at a meet and loving the form factor. Have had a lot of troubles with the indexing (a mere 100GB mind you). This and a couple of other DAP have got me a bit disenfranchised on the whole ordeal - if I had to pay for them (well I did for the Colorflys) I don't know what I would have done. 
 
Funnily enough my Clip Zip starts up in 5-6 seconds and indexes a 4GB SD card like molasses. While the internal 4GB take 10-15 seconds to scan. Don't make me talk about the 64GB sd card...usually I have the artist and title, genres and etc be damned. Beets and Musicbrainz has decent options especially when you turn the cruft off.
 
But enough about my dilemmas. I'm just impatient that way. We are talking about usability, to put it in perspective - everyone will have their preferences about that sort of stuff.

TwinQY there is something wrong on your end then. Means your tags are filthy. Possibly incompatible characters causing slow indexing. Or excessive junk in the tags. Could be a tag format that doesn't play well on that particular DAP. I also had the AK100 and it acted the exact same way as my AK120. No problems at all with indexing files. Only did it once and I had the ability to turn off indexing so it never does it again until I want it to. So it's really an issue on your end in this case. Even for the Sansa product. This was the unit that actually got me to figure out that my tags where causing most if not all of my long indexing times.
 
I had about 3,500 mp3 files on the Fuze. Every time I would add a new file or files. It would take 15+ minutes to fully index it. The internal memory still indexed reasonably fast. But not the SD card. Once I removed all the filth from my tags, properly tagged them with what is needed (removing excess junk and changed the ID tag format to IDv3.2 ISO-8859-1) it then took only 5 minutes to index the card after. That is much better than 15+ minutes. Probably closer to 17 minutes in total. With the iphone4 I had issues with album art showing up so I had to jump through hoops to get that working. But keeping album art in the 500X500 range seems to be a universal cure for most DAPs in that respects. So I try to always keep that in mind. Some album art can be ridiculously large. But I love the detail .
 
I do have a guide on how to properly tag your music. It has helped some people so it may work for you as well. Also I've had issues with multiple tags being imbedded into files which causes major problems on DAPs. There's a lot that can go wrong in tagging but once you figure it out and have your own system it's very easy to implement and upkeep.
 
http://www.head-fi.org/a/mp3tag-setup-guide

 

[TwinQY]

  TwinQY there is something wrong on your end then. Means your tags are filthy. Incompatible characters causing slow indexing. I also had the AK100 and it acted the exact same way as my AK120. No problems at all with indexing files. Only did it once and I had the ability to turn off indexing so it never does it again until I want it to. So it's really an issue on your end in this case. Even for the Sansa product. This was the unit that actually got me to figure out that my tags where causing most if not all of my long indexing times. I had about 3,500 mp3 files on the Fuze. Every time I would add a new file or files. It would take 15+ minutes to fully index it. The internal memory still indexed reasonably fast. But not the SD card. Once I removed all the filth from my tags, properly tagged them with what is needed. It only took 5 minutes to index the card after. That is much better than 15+ minutes. Probably closer to 17 minutes in total. With the iphone4 I had issues with album art showing up so I had to jump through hoops to get that working. But keeping album art in the 500X500 range seems to be a universal cure for most DAPs in that respects. So I try to always keep that in mind. Some album art can be ridiculously large. But I love the detail .

Yeah this might be getting a bit OT so might want to keep it off the thread.

 

[Hutnicks]

  I don't know about you - but indexing a library on SD is slow. Molasses slow. There's really not a lot of way of getting around it unless you've got a full-on SDXC, no micro (in which case that would be fantastic - although not a lot of people doing it). I'd rather have onboard NAND by itself - although adding sd wouldn't hurt but it wouldn't really matter - and the thing is that most people report great things with indexing on the old Walkmans. So there is a method to the madness - and really, do people not complain about the Classic not having SD because it's Apple, or because most of us probably won't need it since there's f-ing 240GB on it? I'm not defending them - because there really is no excuse, you're right -  but it seems that just this one thing seems to be rather benign.
 
I think the main point that this thread bases itself on is the fact that things at their current state are not usable. The Sony appears to be usable and make an attempt to sound good. But only time will tell. There might be a few nitpicks but at least there's some looking towards a better direction.

What class SD cards are you using?

 

[DigitalFreak]

Actually, considering what you guys are talking about has something to do with usability I don't mind if you guys decide to continue on with the discussion in here. TwinQY, I've used lee's guide for file cleaning and I've continued to use it ever since. My V player and DX50 all scanned a full 64GB card in under or around 5 minutes using both FLAC and ALAC. I've been lucky in that any file scanning issues to date have been minimal