For all you music lovers! (Sony Walkman NW-A1000 6 GB)

Member Name: blimeycharlie

Product:	Sony Walkman NW-A1000 6 GB
Date:	14/01/08 (79 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very good sound quality, plus it has sony's good reputation behind it.

Disadvantages: poor software (on the older versions) , lack of features

I recieved this walkman in the basic silver colour pictured for Christmas of 2005. I was extremely pleased with it and to this day still am. I was always against ipods as a lot of my friends ipods broke for no apparent reason but this has never let me down.

Sound quality- The sound quality on this mp3 player is excellent, and to my ears sounds identical to the cds origional quality. when ripping the music I find that there is virtually no difference between high quality tracks and low quality, whichever you choose on this your music will sound great. Another nice feature is that you can select different EQ mixes to suite the style of music you listen to, and best of all you can create your own EQ mix by simply adjusting levels and save it. You have Jazz , Pop , Heavy , unique , 2 custom settings or no Eq to choose from. Origional headphones supplied were quite good but could have been better,they also got rather uncomfortable after prolonged use.

Looks / aesthetics- The player feels nice and is easy to hold but it seems a little heavier than your standard Ipod. As for looks my player is beggining to look a little bit disgusting now, admittedly i do not put it in a case for convenience it lives directly in my pocket but the back has picked up some dull patches and the front screen is filthy, i have tried cleaning it with no sucess what so ever, it appears grimey and as though dust and sweat has gotten under the screen, there are grey patches around the buttons , perhaps caused by sweat. I would do something about it if i could but its almost impossible to get the thing apart (perhaps a sign of good build quality) and there appears to be no replacement faces available on the market. Other than that it once looked glorious and space aged.

Ease of use- well as for navigating the thing goes its really simple, there are only 3 buttons and a directional cross. To switch it off you either press the pause button and wait or the quicker option of pressing and holding the options button. Its not as easy to navigate the ,menus as on an Ipod but its very close, and more controlled i feel than the ipod directional wheel. Creating a playlist is a long and boring task if you do it using the player alone, you have to select and play the song you want to bookmark in a playlist and either open the options menu and then choose a destination for the song or press and hold the pause button and wait 3 seconds , your song is then interrupted with a rather annoying beep and a message wich pops up onscreen telling you the song has been added to a playlist. this process is then repeated to add more.

Build quality- the player itself seems solid as a rock, ive dropped it a few times and nothing at all happened to it, not even a scratch. the Headphones supplied broke after about a year, they just wore so much that the cable snapped. ive since replaced them with some bose portable headphones which were of supreme sound quality but unfortunately , the rubber ear plugs kept falling off and i lost them far too often, so I switched to some better quality sony headphones(MDR-Ex71) that are very comfortable with excellent sound quality, and i have lost the rubber ear pieces less with this set (about 4 times) they are still more convenient. i would recommend them.

Features- theres nothing much new here, you have several play modes which i rarely ever use, such as history mode where you can select a playlist of the exact songs you listened to on the 12th /04/07 for example. which i think is a tad pointless because I dont think anyone would remeber the exact songs they listened to in order on which day a week ago say. you also have the ability to shuffle play the entire mp3 , or just your favourite 100 tracks. the top 100 mode was good for a year until it completely stopped updating. It was supposed to automatically generate a playlist based on song rating and the amount of times you listened to each track, but I know for a fact there are loads of songs i listen to more than the ones on the top ten and i think the connect software may be the cause of the problem. If you want to connect the player to a hifi or other audio device (apart from sonys docking speakers which are also a good buy) you have to go into settings on the home menu and select line out mode to hear any sound; something which I believe the new Ipods do automatically. Lastly there is the supposedly revolutionary artist link button which is a very dissapointing feature and in my opinion a waste of money and memory. It never seems to display the artist(s) i feel should be in the same category as each other which is the whole point of the button. its useless.

Download speeds- Tracks download to this device relatively fast, it can be slow at times, but you have to be patient with it. If you disconnect the cable too soon you will corrupt the device.

Software- the software i got with this device is one of its main drawbacks, its incredibly slow to load or do anything on , it doesnt always get the info right and sometimes fragments albums so you have to try and put them all back together manually which isnt always possible. If you dont you may have two albums displayed on your mp3 when its only a one disk album and you cant play through them in one continuous shuffle. Another gripe is that connect player sets itself as your default program to open any audio file rather than windows media player, a real pain considering how long it takes to load (which you can fix by right clicking on a sound file and selecting always open this type of file with ..... ). I have heard though that the software they now supply with this mp3 player is different because they had so many complaints about Connect player.
Instead you now get Sonic stage.

lastly, i have to mention that once I loaded a fair amount of songs onto the player it became very sluggish when flicking through the menus ,and on very rare occasion froze temporarily.

in conclusion, i feel that this player is a good investment if you just want to listen to music , its straight-forward and simple. If you want videos , extra features , and faster menus with less software headaches buy an Ipod , i would give this 3 and a half stars but as you cant give half star ratings on dooyoo i will give it 4 because it has been reliable and it is of high quality.

Summary: an excellent buy for someone who just wants to listen to their music

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