Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been making a very important decision- what MP3 player to buy to accompany me on my travels and eventually through b-school. I reckon these devices have become like mobile phones, a fashion item- further complicating consumer choice these days.
I used to be a huge fan of minidiscs with their fancy ATRAC audio compression technology, having stuck with them for almost 10 years as my portable music format of choice. I resisted the temptation through the early phase of switching to MP3 players simply due to the fact that the cost for a unit music space was still far lower on minidiscs than for MP3 players (use of memory cards etc…). Then hard disk MP3 players arrived, and it all changed, with the now ubiquitous i-POD as the must have “cool” gadget. I was very tempted and I almost made the switch. When now forced to make the choice with prices of all players similar, I decided to do more research to get a balanced view, I first checked out i-river and other manufacturers of 20GB MP3 players, they differentiated themselves with a host of features including easy drag and drop features- but to be honest most of them still look ugly & clumsy- not cool enough for b-school. Just when I thought I had abandoned Sony’s offerings, they started releasing their “network walkman” (NW) series, and despite their un-original name and given the fact that they only played Sony’s proprietary ATRAC3 format it was not really an i-POD challenger. But the over the last year, the MP3 player war has been intensifying, and now Sony have released the NW-HD5, their latest instalment which plays MP3s, WMAs, WAVs and ATRAC. It is THE i-POD killer- yes, it looks good, very small, offers clever g-shock protection and to top it off, it is capable of 40 hours battery life! I was almost sold.
There was one thing I was not happy about. Why have Sony insisted so much on pushing their ATRAC3 audio compression technology from minidisc onto hard-disk players? I knew ATRAC compression was better than WMA & MP3, but who cares? Most digital music is in MP3 and they occupy roughly the same space… I was wrong about the last part. As a closet audiophile, I decided to investigate and compare- To my horror, tests claim that ATRAC3plus (now used in the NW-HD5) is significantly better than MP3, especially at the standard 128kps quality; independent tests have measured ATRAC3plus fidelity at 64kbps and found its audio quality equivalent to 128kbps MP3! What does that mean? It does not take a genius to work out that you can fit twice the music for the equivalent quality on the Sony NW-players that the iPOD. My mind is made up- And which colour? A Stanford red of course!
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The NW-HD5 interfaces with Connect Music Store. affiliated with Sony's music labels and independent artists so it's equivalent to i-tunes.
Fot me the decision was also made easier when I realised I could easily transfer my whole minidisc (ATRAC) collection onto it.
Should get it by early next week and will definitely post something after road testing it. It will be interesting to see if Sony can regain the "walkman" crown from Apple, they are certainly trying.
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