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How Sony's HD Audio Player Falls Short

Posted by timothy on from the let-them-count-the-ways dept.

Mr_Silver writes "Sony's new MP3 based HD player (the snappily titled NW-HD3) is reviewed over at head-fi.org. Unfortunately it can't remember where you last were located when browsing, you can't list all the songs by an artist, 1.5 hours to transfer 2100 songs (instead of the iPod's 15 minutes) and a wall of noise in the output. Final conclusion? 'If there was a way I could return this thing, I'd do it in a second.' So close, yet so far." Update: 12/14 00:35 GMT by T : Not quite so fast: As forums.minidisc.org Administrator Christopher MacManus writes, it turns out that (as the threads below this review reveal), "The reviewer discovers that the unit he had is defective as someone else employs one and there is no hiss issue. Furthermore, the software woes he experienced are related to him employing JAPANESE software on an English operating system. Sonicstage 2.3, which he needs to use the unit, is now available in English."

3 of 359 comments (clear)

  1. It takes.... by dj245 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...A special kind of sadistic bastard to make a portable music player that doesn't play MP3 files (as most previous Sony products did). Sadistic bastards generally don't make stellar products when their main concerns are pushing file formats.

    --
    Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
  2. Apple's Edge by saddino · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The post mortems of this and other so-called "iPod Killers" are beginning to expose the difficulty of creating:
    1) a sleek, feature rich MP3 player;
    2) sleek, intuitive software to run on the player; and
    3) sleek, intuitive software to interface with it.

    (and optionally a sleek music store to interface with it)

    For those who belittle Apple's achievement or dismiss their market success as "clever marketing," the failure of Sony and others to basically get their engineering shit in order should be more than telling: apparently, creating a great MP3 player really is hard.

  3. Re:what were these guys thinking? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I think the MP3 player industry is just crazy. Seriously, its just run by loons. My original Archos 6 gig was a very simple device. I would *gasp* make folders and put songs in them. Every other device I've owned had some special client software with some fancy synch crap.

    It blows my mind that mp3 player developers think the user is so stupid that a simple copy and paste is beyond them, thus they must help them will these badly done client apps.

    The worst is the Neuros. If an mp3 doesnt have an ID3 tag, it wont even show it in the damn "mp3 browser" part of the client software. Its exactly like the file doesnt exist. You have to find that file and manually edit the ID3. There's not even a n "unknown songs" category so I can do this in the client by looking at the filename. Not to mention, the only way to add songs is to use the client. If you copy a file over via USB, the device can't see it until the client updates its little database.

    I hear people complain about their client software all the time. Crashes, too slow, etc. Do they even still make devices that act like hard drives?