My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman • Hacker News Board

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#211

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 1:57 PM UTC

visiblink wrote: post #41

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…

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…

+1 ... rockbox'ed sansa clip+ is the best, except for one thing: browsing. In every other way, it beats all the other options i've seen.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#212

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:02 PM UTC

herbst wrote: post #154

The worst about modern MP3 players is that they have little to zero buttons. I am on my second Sony E39X since my FiiO died a while ago. The Sony are way to expensive for the quality, but other button MP3 players are a different weight and price class. I hate wasting battery for a fancy screen and Android like OS, like most MP3 players these days. The reason I never stopped using a MP3 player is because I have 20/30+…

> The reason I never stopped using a MP3 player is because I have 20/30+ hours of HQ music organized in folders, just as I like it.

20-30 hours. Hmm.

Clementine tells me: 16345 tracks (64 days 16:52:45)

And that's not even large by the comparison with some friends.

And yes, it all fits on my Sansa Clip+ (except that I keep the christmas music off the Clip+).

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#213

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:03 PM UTC

Reason077 wrote: post #175

It’s not a real “Walkman” unless it can play cassette tapes. I’m sure anyone who grew up in the 1980s/90s would agree. How else am I going to listen to my Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys collection?

Same way I listen to my collection of 80s dance/club 12" vinyl, which I sold 3 years ago: find them all on YT and download the audio.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#214

Post by PaulDavisThe1st » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:05 PM UTC

MarkG509 wrote: post #6

csdvrx wrote: post #2

As the happy owner of a NW-Z507 (and matching Sony 1000XM4 earbuds and a more traditional WH-XB900N over-the-ear headset), the Sony Walkman lineup is worth every single dollar! It's helped me rediscover some of my classics! The 507 is Android, which was both a pro (more apps) and con (battery life) especially since the Sony default player is a bit special. I didn't need Android as I don't use streaming, but I wanted…

I'd love to A-B these to my trusty old FiiO X5 with Sennheiser HD-650's (at home) or IE8i's (when exercising). Hearing the sound-stage and subtle do-dads buried by lesser set-ups is a pet-peeve of mine. A very important, perhaps dominant, factor in all of this is how the music was ripped/encoded. Except in my car, for which I did separate rips, I don't bother with MP3-320. For the X5, having 200 CDs ripped via WMA9 l…

You've no doubt double blind tested these claims?

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#215

Post by hnlmorg » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:13 PM UTC

alpaca128 wrote: post #191

hnlmorg wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hardware buttons I agree with. But the Sony NW-A55 Walkman we are comparing against requires constant touchscreen interaction too so it's not really any better than a smart phone. Plus most phones have hardware buttons for volume anyway. As for high fidelity audio, I doubt there is much between devices these days. I remember back when I was buying portable cassette and, later, CD players there did used to be a real n…

I like to keep music playback separate from my phone because I hate having it interrupted by some random app notification. And on my smartphone I have to push the volume to the max to barely reach the level I consider normal with my headphones. On the Walkman that's not an issue and the difference in sound is immediately noticeable. Of course that doesn't matter if you use Bluetooth, but as there isn't a single decen…

I have done comparisons. :) It used to be that the key differentiator was a hardware's DAC but I can't say I've noticed that much difference in the last 10 years. Even a cheap Chinese phone I used for a bit sounded equivalent. And that was before I switched to bluetooth.

I do really notice the difference on non-portable hardware though. I have used a bunch of different USB devices and they vary wildly. I have 4 amplifiers and several audio switching boxed rack mounted right next to me (they power 9 speakers, 2 CRT TVs, 4 LCD monitors and a projector :D).

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#216

Post by wg4t3464y4 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 2:20 PM UTC

Sandisk makes a line of budget players, that while inferior in many aspects, excel in at least one major area over most competitors: they all have physical buttons, not a touch screen. For a music player, this is a must, because it lets you pause/play, fastforward/rewind, skip track go back, raise/lower volume without having to actually look at the screen.

I clip mine to the inside of my left pants pocket, and other than track selection, I can operate the entire thing without having to look at it.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#217

Post by Toreno96 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:00 PM UTC

cropcirclbureau wrote: post #205

jstummbillig wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worse, for which usecase? For most use cases. > I as a musician like to listen to full albums [...] How does Spotify prohibits you as a musician from listening to an album or reading up on music or looking at music from eras? I detect nothing in any of these tasks that Spotify would make harder than any of the alternativ ways I know of. If anything it should be easier, considering the considerable amount of meta in…

Here's one reason: you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry. You might think it's a little change but it completely devastates the experience if you're someone who listens to whole albums. That's not the only UX hurdle if you're someone who curates a library of things to listen to instead of engorging from an algorithm. Sure, you can follow albums and artist…

> you can only have playlist of songs. There's no way to collapse songs of a single album to one entry.

You could add the whole albums to the playlist, one by one, and then play the playlist w/ shuffle disabled. This last bit makes it a limited workaround, however.

On the other hand, Spotify API could allow to implement the custom solution to shuffle these, similar to https://spotifyshuffler.com/, if you have enough skills, time, and determination to do that.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#218

Post by aceazzameen » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:12 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #201

zasdffaa wrote: post #116

Regarding the interface: no. I bought one of these and regretted it ever since. It may well be better than the competition currently, but it is still got a shitty interface that demands your attention for anything. Small example: to switch off you have to press and hold the off button (edit: a few seconds), then it pops up a modal but asks you whether you really want to turn it off. Err, yes please? The 'off' button…

Electronics are getting more 'needy' all the time. Try switching off a modern TV, it requires three or four steps in sequence or you can start all over again. In the good old days you just hit the 'off' button and that was it. Ditto for navigation, in car systems (the designers of non-tactile systems deserve a special place in hell and hopefully their victims don't haunt them in person), phones and so on. They all se…

I don't even think my Sony Android TV is capable of turning off! Press power on the remote and it goes to sleep. Ok, that's fine. But when an app is unresponsive I have to hold the remote power button for something like 6 seconds and it only reboots the TV. I can't even find a software shutdown button.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#219

Post by pier25 » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:13 PM UTC

jstummbillig wrote: post #114

I am mostly confused by what the author thinks the selling point is. > I can’t describe what a breath of fresh air this is compared to how bad modern smartphone music and streaming apps have become. Well, I was hoping they would try to describe it, because personally, I would have to wear my most deeply shaded nostalgia glasses to think that MP3 player UX has ever been comparable to what Spotify offers nowadays. And…

Spotify has an opportunity here to sell a hi quality portable player with a good DAC and headphones amp.

It's obviously a niche product, but if they started streaming in FLAC and paired it with their own audiophile player, it would be a fantastic marketing stunt they would probably turn a profit by selling the devices. God knows what audiophiles do to be able to listen to audio on the go with a good DAC and amp.

Re: My New Sony NW-A55 Walkman

#220

Post by rchaud » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 3:25 PM UTC

As an MP3 player fanatic in the pre-smartphone era, this post brought back a wave of nostalgia. Tactile buttons! A proper DAC! A device that does one thing, and does it well!

I miss the ability to control playback using physical buttons, and not having to look at the device. Back when Android firmware flashing was common (OEMs rarely sell phones with unlockable bootloaders today), you could use the volume buttons to act as "forward/backward 1 track" buttons by holding them down. That hasn't worked on a single other phone I owned after 2014.

I loved the default Android music app too, and then one day the UI started showing items from Google Music Cloud or whatever, right alongside my locally stored tracks, as if they were the same. I jumped ship right away, but had to find an alternative music player app that was "offline-only".