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My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

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Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#101

Post by waiseristy »

gyulai wrote: post #87
waiseristy wrote: post #78

Hottest of takes : A shitty music app on my phone like Spotify is 1000x more convenient than a dedicated music device will ever be. As a society we already processed and answered this question in the late 00's. PMP's (heh, remember that term?) suck. All-in-one devices are better Hot-take over.

> As a society we already processed and answered It's difficult to disentangle this from the switch to streaming and regarding the latter it is very much unclear whether this was a consumer preference or just something that one-sidedly benefitted an oligopolistic music industry and consumers just had to live with it. Even if a preference for streaming apps reflects an uncoerced choice that a majority of consumers mad…

You know what was an oligopoly? The original music services we used in the early aughts. The *vast majority* of music being bought and downloaded in the wild west days of PMP's was from iTunes. And I think you would be surprised to see that Amazon and iTunes account for a significant amount of music sales still to this day

It's plain to see that the needs and preferences of minority users are being served too. This NW-A55 device obviously has a following. Sony pumps out a PMP every so often. Music nerds are probably the #1 target for weird enthusiast gear outside of gaming/pop-culture knickknacks.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#102

Post by ifelsethenyeah »

jwmoz wrote: post #89

It's nerdy. Pointless though imo when you have a phone and Spotify. The days of hoarding mp3s are gone, thankfully.

Keep your hands off my FLAC and MP3 hoards. :P

Actually, Spotify's catalog isn't that impressive. I use Plexamp when Spotify's choices get old. Soundcloud also has infinite permutations of remixes.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#103

Post by thirdsun »

pcmoney wrote: post #7

Somebody help me understand this? If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services? I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad? I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system? Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?

Because there's a lot of niche, obscure music missing from streaming services. People who are into music care about those gaps in the catalogue and they want to own their collection without fear of loosing access to their content due to changing rights, which might happen any day.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#104

Post by iasay »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #63
hug wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to deny that, when picking up the two & due to some trickery of your own brain, you prefer the iPhone 8, but I do doubt is that it is because of a measurable difference in audio quality.

Perhaps, but I was comparing Apple ear buds with the 3.5mm jack vs lightning ones. Presumably the drivers and whatnot would be similar. In general I don't think audio quality has ever been particularly important to Apple. The iPhone (and all smartphones really) is a jack of all trades gizmo not a device for high quality audio playback. I remember when I had a first gen iPhone and the call quality was atrocious with A…

Not so sure about that.

I’ve got a decent quality pro audio interface and monitor headphones. I’ve also got airpod pros. The AirPods sound much much better and I prefer listening to anything with them.

It’s all subjective.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#105

Post by INTPenis »

waiseristy wrote: post #78

Hottest of takes : A shitty music app on my phone like Spotify is 1000x more convenient than a dedicated music device will ever be. As a society we already processed and answered this question in the late 00's. PMP's (heh, remember that term?) suck. All-in-one devices are better Hot-take over.

Yes it is convenient, I agree with you.

But it's also frustrating when one track in the middle of an album disappears, or when a few tracks from an old playlist are suddenly greyed out for some licensing reason.

For these reasons I started buying actual records of my favorite albums a few years ago. I realized I had spent X amount on 10 years of Google Music (now youtube music) and had nothing to show for it. In fact, during that time tracks had disappeared from my playlists.

So I felt more like a conservator than a music lover buying up old 90s albums.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#106

Post by blep-arsh »

cm2187 wrote: post #83
blep-arsh wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sony specifically might not be the best option for a modern audio player. I've tried using A55 but exchanged it for a Shanling M0 eventually.

Why is that? The thing that terrifies me with less known brands is the quality of the DAC. I had so many shitty mp3 players before settling on ipods in 2003. Even today most laptops motherboard DAC are useless.

P.S. These players don't have very powerful CPUs, obviously, and this makes me wonder whether they can handle more complex audio compression formats (such as AAC encoding for Bluetooth) without cheating and using sub-optimal encoding settings.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#107

Post by INTPenis »

leeoniya wrote: post #49
visiblink wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Rockboxed Sansa Clip+. I like that I can set it to turn off automatically, so I can fall asleep listening and not have it play all night. I also like that it will pick up right where I left off the last time. That's nice for podcasts and books. I suppose that might be what you meant by bookmarking. You can buy a one-foot 3.5 mm extension cord with a right angle plug for a few dollars to avoid repeatedly stre…

> I have a Rockboxed Sansa Clip+ +1, it's a great audiophile quality tiny little player. i recently got a HiBy R3 Pro Saber, but still frequently come back to my Rockbox'ed Clip+ for its much smaller size.

Can you tell me if the Hiby has a sleep feature? I'm looking at the store[1] but can't see it listed as a feature.

1. https://store.hiby.com/products/hiby-r3-pro-saber

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#108

Post by gbanfalvi »

I recently started transitioning away from using my phone for everything to having dedicated devices and I quite like it.

I have an Analogue Pocket I buy second-hand game boy cartridges for, I have an e-reader on which I read e-pubs, etc.

The “integration experience” is _a lot_ tougher. I can’t buy games from an App Store and I need to plug in the reader to Calibre to get my next book… but the actual user experience is so much better. I don’t know if it’s the dedicated hardware or the uninterrupted experience or something else… it just lets the content shine through much more clearly.

I’m an app developer and I strongly believed that we can have one device replace pretty much everything else almost perfectly… but now I kinda wanna try having a Walkman and getting rid of Spotify.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#109

Post by iasay »

thirdsun wrote: post #103
pcmoney wrote: post #7

Somebody help me understand this? If the audio quality isn’t better why is it so much better than the “bad” subscription services? I understand critiques of how little they pay artists but I mean from a customer perspective, why is spotify et al bad? I assume you have to buy download organize and sync the music for this system? Is it just nostalgia? Just a single purpose device that cant text you etc?

Because there's a lot of niche, obscure music missing from streaming services. People who are into music care about those gaps in the catalogue and they want to own their collection without fear of loosing access to their content due to changing rights, which might happen any day.

To note you can add your own music to Apple Music. About half my music was from CDs and iTunes back in the day.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#110

Post by t0mas88 »

mkoryak wrote: post #4

One thing no "new" mp3 player has done correctly is audio books. None of them do bookmarking as well as rockbox. Also, new mp3 players usually have terrible battery life. Because of these reasons, I bought myself about 7 sandisk sansa players on ebay and have gotten very good at fixing their shitty headphone jack problem. With a rockboxed sansa I get about 60 hours of battery life and bookmarking on stop with a list…

Cool to hear Rockbox still alive! I wrote the original graphical UI code for the playing screens many many years ago. Back in the iRiver H120 times.
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