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Sony's "iPod killer" Fails to Draw Blood
Mr_Silver writes "Walter Mossberg (of WSJ fame) managed to review the new Sony NW-HD1 and was distinctly unimpressed. The upsides: it's smaller, lighter and has a battery life of 20 hours. The downsides: goodbye MP3 - hello ATRAC3, slow upload (and converting) times and the confusing user interface on the walkman, PC software and the music store. When will someone pass Sony the cluestick?"
RTFA on this one. They say the stated capacity and battery life only happens when you convert to such a poor quality of file that it sounds like wet dog shit.
It's nothing compared to the Rio Karma. The Karma supports true gapless playback, and has the best S/N ratio of any mojor HD-based player. The docking cradle has ethernet, and the player has a built-in webserver. Last but not least, it's less expensive than the iPod.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
I think the MD format would be much more popular if their copyright fascism were't allowed to dictate the specs.
I got a MD recorder a few years ago to make recordings of concerts, lessons, recitals, and such (I'm a music major), and while the quality is decent and the portability useful, getting the recordings off the player is impossible to do digitally. NetMD doesn't support digital uploading unless the tracks were originally digitally downloaded onto the player, using their shitty software, which of course doesn't come for Mac, and didn't even work when I tried it on my family's PC. I understand you're limited to 2x speed uploading anyway. But the only option for Mac users, and anyone wanting to transfer home-made recordings, is analog upload. I wish I had researched this more beforehand, because this is infuriating.
I think the MiniDisc format had great potential, but Sony's insistence on idiotic copyright meaures just make it way too inconvenient to gain wide acceptance. I use it mainly because (A) I already invested in it and (B) it's easy to cart around, but the format is so needlessly crippled as to be sad.
To transfer MP3 song files from your PC to the Walkman, you first launch the software Sony supplies to manage the Walkman, called SonicStage 2
Oh, man... SonicStage sucks so hard, I can't even begin to describe it. Even if SonicStage 2 is only half as bad as the version I recieved with my minidisc player, it's still enugh to keep me from even thinking about buying any player which requires it.
When it comes to terrible UI design, sonicstage has to be the absolute winner!
Actually, I believe it was Japan Victor Corporation (JVC) that came up with VHS in 1976. RCA Victor went head-to-head with Sony on that one, and it was only Sony's belief that technological superiority automatically equated to superior sales performance that allowed RCA to completely outmaneuver them, and foist VHS upon the world.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I'm still happily chugging away with my 5gb ipod! I'd love to get one of the sleek new ones, but as long as my music remains in MP3 format, my little 1st gen isn't obsolete. It still plays all the latest songs.
Not to mention that it supports FLAC and Ogg (which won the latest round of public listening test. And Rio is now owned by Denon-Marantz, who certainly know a thing or two about audio. The Karma even includes Sennheisser earbuds (unfortunately mx-300 rather than mx-500).
The Rio Karma requires that you convert all your files to some lossy DRM-encumbered format before it will play the files back.
/Michael
Wrong. The Karma plays mp3, ogg, wma and flac. So no need to use a lossy format, nor DRM...
The Rio Karma is also unsupported by Mac OS X
While the Rio Music Manager is Windows only, the Rio Music Manager Lite is Java and should run on any platform supported by Java...
Creative is one of the most consumer-hostile companies in the world
The Karma is from Rio (as the name Rio Karma hints...). Rio is know owned by DNNA (Digital Networks North America) in turn owned by Denon. I fail to see where Creative enters the picture.
Could someone pass character_assassin the cluestick, please?
It seems to me that character_assasin isn't the one needing the cluestick...
I'm actually suprised the Karma hasn't gotten more press on slashdot. It's seriously the geek's mp3 player. The parent mentioned the webserver, but didn't mention that you can download a java app from the karma, and then upload music to it from any OS that has a working java implementation. I've been able to ass songs to mine from Windows, FreeBSD, and Linux this way. For me this is a HUGE advantage and shows a little bit of creativity/foresight on the side of Rio. Also the inclusion of open-source standard codecs like ogg and FLAC (For real audiophiles) is a huge plus. Yet, everyone on here is enamoured with the ipod.
Geeze, I don't know where to start on this one. First, let me clarify one thing: I'm a giant Apple booster. But I use Apple products (iBook G4, PowerMac G4, Airport Express, 3G iPod, even a damn iSight) because they are great products; I don't defend Apple products strictly because Apple makes them. I've been accused of being a basher before (not that you have accused me here), oftentimes because I'm not afraid of calling a spade a spade.
I read the review last week, so my memory may be fuzzy. But Sony claims a 30 hour battery life, making the cardinal mistake of overpromising when it's unnecessary (22 hours is damn good; they also overpromised on song storage-- saying it could hold 13,000 songs was just a stupid thing to do). But in Walt's test, he got 22 hours of usage for 132kbps 8TRAC compared to 12+ hours for the iPod. It clearly is the winner.
Your other points are self-contradictory-- first saying that iPod is so small it doesn't need to be any smaller so Sony wasted their effort, then defending the iPod mini as being in a different class, so the comparison to the Sony is unfair. That's just wrong, as the Sony is small enough that many miniPod users would opt for the NW-1 instead. As for distinct markets, that's wishful thinking. There's a spectrum of MP3 players ranging from tiny flash based players,to larger (but still light) flash players to miniPod types, to the iPods and finally to the 60-80GB devices that are quite large. Apple did a very clever thing in trying to segment the market into 2 distincts, and then pointing out they have the best device in both markets. But just 'cause Apple says it, doesn't make it true.
Audiophile SO does not equal pro audio. Please never confuse the two again. I was referring to products used in radio, TV, recording, etc. I.E. professionals, not people who like spending thousands on a CD player because some mythical enhancement makes it sound better. If Denon wants to follow consumer product practices, they should stop advertising and pricing their products as if they were professional grade.
You know who makes good pro CD players? TASCAM. TEAC makes one good model too. HHB makes nice stuff. But TASCAM - we've had 3 of them in 24-hour-per-day heavy use at my old station for over 5 years. We've had to pull one once every 18-24 months for something minor, and their service department fixed our one fully broken one cheap and quick. Contrast that with the Denons we used to use, which would (without fail) break massively, usually the transport, at 6 months. And then we'd have to hassle the service department to get them to agree to even look at, much less fix, them.
Marantz's tape gear is great; we have a tape/CD-RW unit for doing straight-to-disc recording of the air signal and its pretty decent, but I've never used one of their pure CD players. Denon, on the other hand, makes crap.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Actually, the Apple Lossless Encoder (ALE) encodes as high bit-rate AAC. AAC is an open standard.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
You know that the iPod is a mass storage device (FIrewire and USB) as well?
It's just a hard drive when you plug it in. When iTunes uploads music, it's via straight hard drive transfer. The *only* reason you need iTunes is to optimize the battery performance of the iPod. It writes an index file for every song uploaded into the iPod so that when you are browsing, seeking, and viewing title/album/artist info, you aren't killing battery life by thrashing the hard drive. Instead you are reading a roughly 11mb database.
GPL Deconstructed
At least when it comes to the iRiver - its due to the battery type. The iPod uses a Lithium ion battery, whereas the iRiver uses a more expensive Lithium polymer battery, which has a greater capacity.
Um, isn't that EXACTLY what I wrote?
The iPod is 100% just a firewire/usb FAT/HFS+ hard drive.
I own one.
The music files are stored in a hidden (but otherwise normal) directory. I can browse it easily enough using the CLI of Finder as I like.
The files are raw; you can play them in iTunes if you so wish. Or any other music player.
The database, which I mentioned before, is how the iPod navigates this hidden directory; if they do not match, you won't find your music. So, as I said before, to preserve battery life and reduce hits to the disk, the iPod only browses the 11mb database file in memory to display album/artist/playlist/ID3 info until you actually hit 'play', and then the disk seeks, sucks data into memory, and plays.
GPL Deconstructed
1) Wrong, the iPod uses Lithium Polymer, that's how they fit the friekin' battery in such a small package. Use Google to find some references.
2) LI-Poly isn't necessarily higher capacity, but it's not constrained to a certain shape. Normal Li-Ion batteries come as packs of pre-made cells, wasting a significant amount of space to their cylindric al size. Li-Poly batteries can be made in a much wider range of shapes, and so allow the manufacturer to fit more actual battery in a given space.
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