| Originally Posted by Eagle_Driver It's ironic that it's my own continuing frustration with Sony products that drove me to buying one. One of my most frustrating moments with most of the Sony players is that their headphone outputs are both very feeble and of horrible quality at the same time (in fact, one of my Sony players had serious trouble driving even cheap Sony earbuds loud enough without clipping, even in a dead-quiet room - and that Sony sounded worse than even the headphone jack from a cheap stereo clock radio at that Sony's maximum usable volume setting). The second is that a few of my recent Sony portable players broke just after the labor warranty expired - and Sony wants to charge a lot more than what I had originally paid for the players just to even look at the problem, and then some more to fix them! (They want $80 just to look at a $60 player, and then charge another $40 on top of that to fix it. And having Sony repair a $200 portable player that had been brought in 91 days after the original purchase date would have ended up costing as much as what the player itself originally sold for.) Oh, by the way, if you think the iPod sucks, you'll be even more frustrated with your new Sony HD player. I've found the Sony HD-based players cannot play back MP3s directly without having them wrapped in a proprietary DRM wrapper. (I finally got my hands on one of them for a few minutes.) All MP3s to be played back on that player must either be converted to ATRAC3 or ATRAC3Plus via (the often buggy and unstable, even with fixes) SonicStage or be transferred through Sony's proprietary MP3 manager program - both of which impose DRM restrictions on the transferred files. (Previous MP3-compatible non-CD Sonys could only read ATRAC3 files.) WAV, FLAC, WMA? Fuhgeddaboudit. Those files must be converted to ATRAC3 or ATRAC3Plus via SonicStage in order for the Sony players to play those files; the Sony players know only ATRAC and its variants, and some Sony players know MP3 files that have been wrapped in Sony-compatible DRM. The Sony flash- and HD-based players do not support playback of uncompressed and lossless-compressed audio files at all whatsoever - they must be transcoded into a lossy compressed format before they'll even play at all. And sadly, the MP3 players are not the only poorly-executed products from Sony. Their headphones are, for the most part, underachievers for their price. |
| Originally Posted by heminder the HD3 can play MP3 files natively, although my music is already in ATRAC format. besides, who on earth wants to play MP3??? it's 15 -almost 20- years old! and the compression is crp. ATRAC@64kbps = MP3@128kbps. so ha! if you're worried about DRM, then iPod has it aswell. on MP3 and on AAC. also, SonicStage works a dream on my PC. i just don't get why people always moan about it. |
| Originally Posted by Eagle_Driver The problem is, I dislike ATRAC in general. To my ears, ATRAC @ 292kbps = MP3 @ 96kbps. (Especially if the ATRAC file originated from a file that had been encoded to another lossy format to begin with.) Oh, by the way, I dislike the sound quality of Sony's portables in general. Most of them sound muddy, detailless and severely colored no matter what I tried to do with them. (Hence my continuing frustration with recent Sony portables.) Oh, by the way, I tried SonicStage myself. It constantly crashed on my system (even the latest release of SS), and I had to disable the startup programs like my antivirus and firewall programs that I absolutely require just to get SonicStage to even come close to running correctly. Oh, I have just completed reformatting my computer's hard drive and reinstalling Windows. I've been hit with several Trojan Horses which hosed my previous Windows installation (it happened during the brief few minutes which I had AV and firewall disabled). The last straw was the refusal to shut down Windows at all after surfing the Internet, requiring a hard reset. |
| Originally Posted by heminder besides, who on earth wants to play MP3??? it's 15 -almost 20- years old! and the compression is crp. |
| Originally Posted by Beethovenian The problem with these threads is that we inevitably end up going beyond the reasonable because of passions. Honestly, I think we are so far from having a perfect portable audio player that no passion is warranted. I admit that the iPod comes closest to being the best player for the average user. Yet it fails so badly in some aspects -- firstly, for me, the gapless issue (I don't consider acceptable the argument that few people care about it; if music requires it, a music player has to have it). Of course, the competitors all have their flaws as well. The Rio Karma clearly puts the iPod to shame in many features, but it has arguably reliability issues and it can be said that many of its cool features will never be used by most of the consumers. The HD Walmans are gorgeous pieces of hardware that demonstrate Sony's engineering prowess in making devices that soundly beat the iPod in compactness and battery life, but they suffer from poor software. The iRiver players offer you an abundance of features, yet they're hardly pocketable. And so on. The thing is, the fact that the iPod seems to get more things right than the others (or makes it easier to use) gives it a goodwill that is disproportionate to its qualities. Some people make it seem like an eight wonder. Tech reviewers tend to be too tolerant to its flaws. I think that's why you end up seeing some iPod haters and some unfair criticism in this type of thread. But let's get real. No player is perfect, no player is for everyone. |
| Originally Posted by Krishna Gapless is essential on certain types of music. For example Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon would sound terrible if it had gaps between each song. |
| Originally Posted by Krishna Gapless is essential on certain types of music. For example Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon would sound terrible if it had gaps between each song. |
