You´re about to read the fifth out of nine reviews. You don´t need to read them all, just pick the unit that seems to be the most interesting to you. In the weeks to follow I´ll review the following units: Kenwood DP-5090, Pioneer DV-610, Sony CDP-470, Pioneer BDP-140, iRiver IMP-550, Sony MZ-R 55, Sony MZ-R 37, Sony NW-A 1000 and the Sansa Clip+. Stay tuned and enjoy the new review: the Sony NW-A 1000! I also implore you to read the article describing my rigorous testing methodology before you actually start reading this one.
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| Sony NW-A 1000 |
I admit it: I´m a Sony fan. Sue me. What other reason would I have to purchase a portable player that is forced to use the dreaded piece of software called SonicStage? Yeah, go ahead and ask "Why?" I wanted to try out something different than mp3 or AAC: because of my good experiences with ATRAC DSP Type-R I thought that the more modern ATRAC3Plus would be an improved version combining less space requirements with equally high sound quality. Boy, was I wrong! After I received the used NW-A 1000 I started to convert several albums to ATRAC3Plus using 256 kBit/s CBR (VBR doesn´t exist) with SonicStage and transferred them to this glossy gadget. While I admired the amount of definition and crispness upon listening to it I noticed a lack of impact, punch and snap. All the transients seemed to have been transformed into cute kittens instead of the wild cat they were before encoding. It didn´t take long for me to discover that the codec itself was the culprit: Sound Forge offers the very same ATRAC3Plus codec as an encoding option (why I didn´t think of testing the codec before purchasing the NW-A 1000 escapes me). With these files encoded by Sound Forge I was able to find out that the codec is neither transparent at 256 kBit/s nor at 352 kBit/s (both have exactly the same quality but the latter uses more space for no reason). Sound Forge also offers a "High Quality" setting for the codec which takes a bit longer to encode; only then will the ATRAC3Plus codec be finally transparent. SonicStage sadly doesn´t offer this option when transferring from PC to portable player, it just encodes with "Normal Quality". You could now say "Why don´t you encode with Sound Forge all the time?" I would if I would keep tagging options! Without tags embedded in the files the Sony won´t show anything on its display, I wouldn´t know what album I´d be picking. CDDB tagging doesn´t help either since SonicStage always messes up the tags (how can someone engineer a software as stupid as this one?). After a firmware update it was able to play AAC files - but that didn´t help either because SonicStage ignores embedded AAC tags, it has to tag itself using its own scheme. The only option I have been left with is to use mp3 which I finally accepted begrudgingly - I´ve started to use 256 kBit/s or 320 kBit/s files CBR (VBR drains the battery faster) using the -q0 switch... it takes forever to encode but the difference in quality is audible (I did a DBT to confirm this).
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| Sony NW-A 1000 backside: heavy metal |
When it was released to the market in 2006 Sony very much desired for it to kill the iPod. Several journalists indeed described the NW-A1000 as being capable of being an "iPod killer" and Sony did everything in their power to make it last inside a highly competitive market being ruled by Apple products since 2001 (for starters they should have terminated SonicStage). As typical for Sony they approached this goal by assuming that customers would be interested in a high quality device that was combined with wonderful sound. It is in fact one of the best manufactured portable players I´ve ever seen, everything fits tightly together, the two (!) transparent layers of plastic acting as the upper shell with the backside being constructed out of thick aluminum. When you touch a button the player doesn´t light up immediately, it takes half a second to light up completely. The same happens when it deactivates or saves power: it slowly dims lights down, with different timings for display and buttons, creating a nice effect. Everything about this player suggests "I´m a high quality device, better than the iPod - love me and abandon Apple." Its design even won a prestigious award from the International Forum Design (I still don´t find it THAT beautiful). It looks and feels like an expensive & heavy space age cigarette case, revealing its true function only at the touch - nifty.
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| Sony NW-A 1000 closeup |
When I took it apart I found that the inside looks pristine as well: Sony seems to have used a bunch of quality parts for it. One example is its D/A converter which is a Burr Brown PCM1772 (still in production), a 24/48 capable high quality converter developed by Texas Instruments with portable gear in mind. Sony combined it with 16 MB RAM and an AN17020A from Panasonic, a headphone amp with additional line-out function. Because in 2006 solid stage cards were still expensive Sony decided to use the Microdrive, produced by IBM. Should a person desire more space than the 6 GB the NW-A 1000 provides one could use of course a CF Card with 16 GB or more (they are really cheap nowadays) - sadly that doesn´t work; the player will accept it but SonicStage won´t. BTW, the Sony really does put out signals with 24 bits - but only for AAC and ATRAC3Plus, not with mp3. Together with the line-out function this creates a tiny portable high end machine. Kudos to Sony for wisely choosing the best hardware the price range allowed. But since customers are more interested in convenience than sound quality this strategy didn´t work because in the end Sony wouldn´t take the market by storm with this player.
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| Sony NW-A 1000 measurments (line-out) |
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| Sony NW-A 1000 jitter (with AAC encoded test file) |
For a portable player using a lossy compression scheme it behaves quite well. Measurment differences between mp3 or AAC were negligible, ATRAC3Plus encoded test signals on the other hand measured horribly, especially at distortions (not caused by the player, the codec just sucks). Jitter however is not so good, the spread around the sine at 11.025 Hz indicates low frequency jitter and has the potential to become audible. I doubt that all other peaks are high frequency jitter, most likely these spikes have been introduced by lossy compression.
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| Sony NW-A 1000: glossy perfection |
How does it sound? It's hardly noticeable that the NW-A 1000 reduces impact of transients and that snap & punch do not completely sound like the reference. The same goes for the speediness of the material: it´s a bit slower compared to the source. But all of this is only valid when music is loud; should it be soft everything is allright. The frequency response diminishes deep bass and treble marginally which might also be responsible for an insignificant loss of resolution and definition. The amount of details on the other hand is pure bliss and a perfect match. Staging sounds like a carbon copy - except for a slight forwardness of everything that´s in the center. It also sounds instable, instruments are wandering around a bit and changing their size slightly. The result of this characteristic is that the NW-A 1000 sometimes sounds "small", too nice and too confused. Well... I have to say that I was somewhat disappointed, I expected it to sound better. Don´t get me wrong, it fares really well, certainly better than the Sansa Clip+, the iRiver IMP-550 or the Kenwood DP-5090. We also have to consider that those three players were reviewed with lossless material while this one used lossy mp3 files! But I still had hoped that this unit would finally be THE ONE with the perfect mixture of convenience, available space and sound. It´s really good and I´ll probably use it often... but I nevertheless will seek an even better player.
Sonic Balance:
Dynamics:
Resolution:
Stage / Ambiance:
Character:
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| Sony NW-A 1000 |
