Could be worse, I guess
Written: Dec 27 '03 (Updated Mar 13 '04)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Sound: |
 |
|
| Ease of Use: |
|
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Portability: |
|
|
| Battery Life: |
 |
|
|
Pros: Comparatively easy navigation, good MP3 playback and decoding
Cons: Limited display, questionable physical integrity, excessive gaps between adjacent MP3s
The Bottom Line: It has issues and limitations-- some of them being serious for the money. But it may hold us over until somebody finally makes an MP3/Ogg player worth a darn.
|
|
|
| lossf's Full Review: Sony Walkman D-NE510 Personal CD Player |
30-DAY UPDATE: I was really starting to like the NE510. I was almost to the point where I could overlook the excessive gaps between MP3 tracks (as discussed below). I'd spent a fair amount of time listening while stationary, and gone walking with it on numerous occasions-- I'd yet to hear it skip.
Then suddenly, late last week during a stationary listening session, it flipped out. Horrible noises emanated from the chassis (far beyond "trying to read the disc"). Playback stopped altogether and the buttons were frozen. I opened up the unit to find frantically turning the center spindle back and forth about five times a second. Finally, it stopped of its own accord and everything was fine. But it did this once more a few days later.
One of the comments on this review also mentions problems with the firmware. My return period was almost up, and in any case the warranty is only 90 days parts and labor. Back it went. I'm now trying out a Samsung MCD-HM200-- I'll write that up in a few days, but so far it makes up for the Sony's major shortcomings (and I spent $20 less for it!).
Well, here we go again. This is the seventh MP3-capable portable CD player I've purchased this year, and the second I've had (database-sufficient) opportunity to review on Epinions. The jury is still out as to whether it will be the last I purchase for a while. I'll admit that the NE510 is new around here and so this review is really an elaborate set of first impressions, which doesn't give room for credible assessments of things like battery life and physical/operational integrity. I will update the review as further experience mandates.
First of all, let me say that I am not one of the millions of "Sony slaves." I do own (and love) a number of older Sony products, which never seem to die no matter what you do to them. I also provide them some free advertising in the form of my 18-month-old Clič PDA (which I admittedly like a heck of a lot). However, I've had innumerable experiences with questionable Sony products in the last five or six years. Their products come at a ridiculous premium that has often no relationship to cutting-edge features, more intelligent design or more solid build quality in comparison to their competition. It seems that Panasonic is quickly following Sony's lead here (in coasting on the hard-earned public equity of their name recognition while letting everything else go to pot). Honestly, given the cost, I probably would not have purchased this Sony unit except out of sheer desperation. I'm simply running out of portables to try.
Most of the other reviews here thus far focus heavily on the ATRAC capabilities of this unit, and I feel there's enough here for anyone interested in that unique facility. This review will be a little different in its orientation, and I hope it comes in handy to those who are looking for similar things in an MP3 CD player. I have no interest in transcoding my existing MP3 collection to another format. As a musician and music fiend, I "adopted" MP3 early. At this point, aside from the gigs and gigs that are still cluttering up my drives, I have seventy burned CDROMs of MP3s, consisting almost entirely of full albums that I have ripped personally. Nowadays, I rip to 256k or 320k LAME. But a good number of my discs were encoded and burned in the dark ages of the technology, when men were men, women were women, 6GB hard drives were "huge," 2x CD burners cost $500 and and 128k Fraunhofer encodes were considered "the best quality you could ask for."
Now, I don't expect pristine fidelity out of any cheap portable device, but if I didn't care at all, I'd buy an AM radio and save some money. I'd be far better off dubbing to cassette than converting some of those already-shady antique encodes to an even more compressed and questionable medium. Even with my more modern rips, the word "transcoding" is not really in my vocabulary. I'll happily live with only five or six hours on a single disc if it means that I don't have to hear the cymbals go SWEEEREEEESHEEEROO all the time. Additionally, I don't want to have to install specialized (and probably poorly written) software on top of spending additional encoding time for the "privilege." So forget all about ATRAC (sorry, Sony)... let's just pull out those MP3 CDRs and take a long hard look at how the NE510 fares.
Construction and layout
The player has a pleasantly slim profile. It is more "elongated" than many portable CD players, but when it comes to shoving something in my pocket I'd rather have long than thick, personally. Also, I've found that the "perfectly round" crop of CD players, like the Panasonic SL-SX420, have a tendency to slide too easily out of my pocket at inopportune moments. So I do like the form factor.
The unit has a DC-in jack (4.5v, sleeve-to-ground) and a headphone jack. To my chagrin, but perhaps to the chagrin of few others, there is no line-output jack.
Like me, you may be seduced by what appears to be a nice, sizeable 2-line LCD display on the front of the unit. You may envision yourself, sitting next to that hot indie-babe on the train, 510 positioned carefully on your lap, while "Godspeed You Black Emperor!" blazes from the display to "inconspicuously" show her how hep you are (ooooh boy, aren't you livin' large circa 2000 A.D. now!). However, you'll note that there's no typical "demo sticker" on the unit in the packaging-- and for good reason. Fully half of this display space is wasted on worthless "dashboard lights," such as an "MP3" indicator that takes up the entire left quarter of the screen for no good reason. What you're left with is actually a 2-line x 10-character alphanumeric display. So, y'know, there's sort of a lack of truth in advertising here. However, having (very intentionally!) misled us, Sony sort of makes good on what's left of the screen real estate. See the "MP3 ID3s, filenames and navigation" section of the review below for more details on this.
The buttons on the unit are not that sensibly laid out and a little hard to press, for the most part. For instance, I don't care for the volume buttons. They're a bit hard to access, press and hold. As is often the problem with digitally-based volume controls, they also do not offer sufficient control or resolution at low volumes (there are only about four "steps" between "medium loud" and "silent"), although they're graded fine (plenty of levels to choose from) once you get up to typical listening levels.
I'm troubled in particular by the four-way "transport rocker" that controls play, stop, track back and forward, and rewind / fast-forward functions. Aside from readily foreseeable longevity concerns (how will you do anything with this player when the poor overused rocker gets knocked the tiniest little bit off its axis?)... well, again, it's semi-difficult to get it to register your input accurately. For instance, doing a search is tricky. Sometimes you'll let off the button once you get to the desired spot, and the unit switches tracks instead of resuming playback at the desired spot. This isn't a big deal to me, since I'm a stickler for "linear experience" of music and not one who usually fast-forwards to my favorite thirty seconds in a song. However, this might be significant to others.
Sony does make up for this design gaffe by providing redundant/alternative functionality. The so-called "jog dial" is a really nice feature that I didn't think I would use, until I actually operated the NE510. You can't tell from the unit in its packaging, but you don't access the dial from the top of the player; you access it from the front/side. (The visible top of the jog dial, right next to the display, is actually sealed in, untouchable, and just "rotates for show.")
Just like the jog dial on my Sony Clič, the dial on the NE510 rotates one "click" at a time from side to side and also registers an inward press as "enter." This allows you to flip through the tracks in an album and the albums on a disc quickly, in addition to switching tracks or starting playback without the use of the play or track forward/back buttons. Unlike the four-way transport rocker, it operates smoothly/accurately and feels very solid.
There is also a pair of dedicated album/folder up and down buttons, which are what you use to switch albums without pressing the "stop" button (although playback of your present album will stop as soon as you touch one of them).
It is largely because of the jog dial and dedicated folder-movement buttons that the NE510 is an unusually intuitive and easy-to-use unit. There are no special button-pressing techniques ("hold the track forward button for three seconds") or magic button combinations required to toggle through the albums on an MP3 CDR. I pulled the unit out of the bubble pack, plugged in the batteries, and was navigating my MP3 discs within a minute. Granted, I'm becoming quite familiar with all the different operational routines on these silly things, but I think the Sony's approach is by far the most sensible and approachable I've seen to date.
There is a hold switch on this unit, which was not visible in the package at the store; I was pretty worried about that. But my concerns were allayed-- it's located on the bottom/underside of the player, and it too is a bit hard to access and operate (which is exactly as it should be). Another hidden switch is the G-Protection level switch, which is found inside the lid, along with the battery casing.
Paradoxically, I think the "open" button may be too easy to operate. It's recessed along the profile of the unit, which should prevent it from being depressed most of the time when residing in one's pocket. However, the ease and smoothness of the eject mechanism leads me to believe that it wouldn't take much accidental pressure on your pants leg to set the lid flying open.
The finish on the unit looks like it will scratch and wear easily. Mine incurred a significant scratch getting it out of the package-- and that was with protective plastic sleeve guarding the scratched area in question on its exit.
I have no reason to believe that the CD transport itself will be unreliable in the short-to-medium-long run-- I'm sure it will hold up to moderate use at least through the full warranty period. That said, everyone knows that the present crop of portable electronics is being built for a shorter and shorter "consumption lifecycle," i.e. even the big guys are building 'em pretty crappy these days in the hopes that we'll forget what they used to be capable of and just blindly buy another. The unit certainly feels more solid than any of the no-name MP3 units still glutting the market in late '03, to say nothing of Panasonic's unfortunately flimsy offerings. (I have a '95 Panasonic portable CD player that is still kicking it. But I seriously doubt this unit, or any other present portable, will still be reading discs without complaint in 2011.)
Fidelity
If you're expecting audio perfection in a $70 portable CD player, you've got bigger problems than I do. But I figure it's worth a few words for those who are attuned to fidelity issues and/or looking at Sony in the hopes of good audio performance.
I haven't evaluated the unit with the provided headphones. Since I've gone through so many of these and they make 'em almost impossible to put back in the packaging, I have this habit of leaving everything in the bubble pack until I'm positive that the player is not going back to the store! Anyway, I have no reason to believe that they're any better than all the other reviews state here (which is to say, they're probably the Achilles heel of the unit). This is not at all unusual, to be fair to Sony. Show me a portable CD player that ships with what you consider "respectable" headphones and I'll show you the business card of my favorite audiologist.
I have tested the unit with an older $20 pair of Sony earbuds, both pairs of my Audio-Technica ATH-908s (basic "studio" semi-opens, about $90 apiece in their day-- not the best, not the worst) and through a pair of trusty Mirage m290i speakers being fed through the headphone out (out to a Mackie board and old Sansui integrated).
I think the unit is sufficiently equipped to drive cheap, anemic phones like my Sony 'buds, which is what it's going to be paired with in most cases. With the buds, there's plenty of volume on tap for me even at about halfway up the volume "scale," although it should be noted that I don't care to listen to my music at ear-splitting levels.
However, I suspect that the available bass boost on the 510 is not going to be sufficient for a lot of the general public. EQ-wise, I'm a total "flathead." But the boost has to be set to full tilt in order to give my earbuds anything resembling warmth and/or presence below 120Hz. This was not the case with the Panasonics I've tried.
The unit sounds just fine with my ATH-908s when run flat, although they're more inefficient and so there's not as much volume on tap. The headphone amp starts clipping at about the 70% mark on the volume "scale," at which point I'm guessing the 908s are being driven to a perceptual volume of about 90dB-- more than enough for me, but probably not enough for many others. Do keep this in mind if you have big, inefficient phones and love to crank it up.
Don't even think about trying to use this player as a dual-purpose home MP3 playback unit. The unit sounds undefined, dull and murky driving a line in through the headphone out. Add that to the lack of true line out, and you'd be far better off buying a $35 Apex DVD deck for your home MP3 needs. By portable standards, the Sony is better than average, and (mostly) good enough for rock and roll. But the present Panasonic line really does have a marked advantage over the NE510 in regards to fidelity (which is not to say that they're very good, either).
Skip-worthiness
I have not yet tested the unit with a standard audio CD, but on MP3s it seems pretty impervious to skipping at both available levels of "G-protection." Keep in mind that I'm not going to be jogging with the unit (and anyone who is should be considering a solid-state device anyway). But I've walked around with it a fair amount, and given it a few continuous minutes of silly shaking by hand while playing at "G-protection" level one. Hasn't skipped at all yet. I'd expect this from a present-day name-brand product, particularly with MP3s.
MP3 ID3s, filenames, and "navigation"
I've tried the 510 with my older MP3 discs, which carry no ID3s of any kind, and newer ones, which carry mostly only ID3v2s. In all cases, the unit is able to discern and completely display the correct information. If an ID3 is present, naturally, it shows that information; failing that, it just shows the actual filename, character for character. Sure, you might expect this, but this is really a marked improvement over, say, the Panasonic implementation of filename / ID3 display.
I've already mentioned the jog dial and folder buttons above. One thing I want to discuss in more detail is the display, which I have also described as "limited" above. When an MP3 starts playing, you'll see the song title (or filename) in the top line, with the folder name down below. This quickly changes to title / filename in top line with "folder number" and time elapsed in the bottom line. Hit "Display" and you'll be able to see the bitrate and sampling rate of the file, which isn't that useful but is kind of nice to have when you're dealing with older discs and/or materials from "random" sources. You can't see folder time totals or time remaining on an MP3 file, which is a bummer, but I'll live.
Anything in the song title or album title that is too long to fit into the tiny little window will scroll, albeit painfully slowly, so that you can eventually figure out what you're listening to. (Increasingly I'm burning things onto MP3 CDRs before I've even really listened to them, so this is pretty important to me!)
I wish that Sony would implement the same kind of scrolling with album and song-title selection. When you go to select a folder, that 10-character display actually gets cut down to seven characters (three characters are taken up by a selection arrow and a little folder icon). There's no scrolling if you wait for the rest to display; it just sits there, showing only the first seven characters of the folder name. So, for instance, I've got a disc in the 510 right now with, among other things, two albums by The Jam. Darned if I'm going to be able to tell between them without starting playback on one or the other.
The same is true of songs on selection. If you try to browse around, the 510 will show you the songs available to you in a given folder, but will only show you the first seven characters of the filename. (This time, your real estate is being wasted by a cute set of eighth-notes.) ID3s won't be used in the file-selection screen, and neither will scrolling. Since I use the fairly standard MP3 file-naming convention of, say, "01 - Deth Is A Four-Letter Word," I've now cut myself down to two visible characters in the song title (two-digit number, space, hyphen, space knocks out five characters of my remaining seven). So at this screen, I'm left to choose between, say, "01 - De" and "02 - Th". Bah and argh. If Sony would just add scrolling to the selection screens too, life with the 510 would be made slightly easier.
But to be honest, none of this is really too big a deal for me. I'm pretty happy once the album is rolling, and can see everything that I might need to see. I can see being a little hacked off if you're one of these people that just burns 3 million single tracks to a root folder-- it would be impossible to find anything.
MP3 playback
The 510 spins up / reads MP3 discs unusually quickly-- comparatively speaking. There's usually only fifteen seconds of twiddling your thumbs before you're navigating through your folders. The deck reads and remembers all folder names at once, so that process is really quick as well. And, typically, there's only a five-second wait between selecting a folder and the beginning of playback. Color me semi-impresssed.
At all bitrates I've tested (128k-320k CBR and ~256k VBR), the MP3 decoding is respectable and clean-sounding overall, without the garbles, FWISHHHHiness, blips or other nasty artifacts that I've often experienced on cheaper players. Again, I expect this level of performance from a "third-generation" name-brand product with a name-brand price premium.
One really nice feature is that, by default, the unit automatically "resumes" your MP3s exactly where you stopped playback. Most CD units are missing this capability, or don't implement it correctly (they only remember the track you were playing on shutdown, and then start from the beginning). I imagine this is very good news to all the live-show, radio-show and books-on-'tape' lovers out there.
I haven't mentioned it, but the unit is really very quiet, mechanically speaking. If you pay attention, you will note the player spinning up and down while reading MP3 files. This is pretty typical among the present crop of MP3 CD players-- they fill their buffers and then shut down until it's time to refill. Usually the 510 spins up for a few seconds every 60-90 seconds, depending on the bitrate.
One aspect that is definitely NOT up to par with ANY of Sony's competition is the space left between tracks. Again, to compare this to the two Panasonic models I've purchased and returned this year (which only leave .5 - 2 seconds of silence between subsequent files), the 510 leaves a completely unacceptable gap between files in an album folder. I've counted anywhere from three to twelve seconds of complete silence between songs, with the average hovering somewhere around the five-second mark. In fact, the player doesn't even bother spinning back up to load in the next track until it's completely finished playing the present one.
Talk about stupid design. By a colossal margin, this is the worst "gapping" I've experienced in any MP3-CD reading device since the very first MP3-capable DVD decks circa 2000. And that includes a whole lot of said devices, including the cheapest of the cheap MP3-CD portables. The gap does seem to improve slightly if you move the "G-protection" to level one, but not by much. I think this kind of a gap is actually going to be annoying very quickly to most users, regardless of their listening habits. (If ten seconds doesn't sound like a big deal, try this test to put it in musical context: Sing the first three lines of "Happy Birthday." Stop at the end of the third line; count "one-one-thousand" ten times; then finish the song.)
Myself, I'm contemplating living with what I consider a fatal flaw. However, that's only because I like the 510 otherwise and, more importantly, I'm so tired of going through deck after deck trying to find the one that actually gets it even close to right.
In my humble opinion, there is no excuse in this day and age for a player to fail to buffer the next MP3 before completing playback. Given that more and more "modern" albums segue one track straight into another, even a 300ms gap in playback is really unacceptable. Five or ten seconds of nothing, where there should be something, can kill the flow of an album, or even completely divorce two tracks that were meant to be heard as one larger construct. The flash-player camp certainly doesn't subject us to this kind of annoyance. It would take hardly any additional thought or R&D to make the dream of a gapless MP3-CD player a reality, and most manufacturers are getting a lot closer even in their own thoughtlessness. So I really hope Sony fixes this problem in its next revision of the 510.
Summary
I think the NE510 is a pretty nice portable CD player, and definitely one of my first choices in the present MP3-playing market. That said, if the manufacturers weren't so half-hearted in their support of MP3 (to say nothing of really dragging their feet in adopting Ogg or any of the open lossless formats), something like this would be scraping the bottom of the barrel. It is 2003 (well, really, 2004). We are in at least the third generation of MP3-CDR players now. There are $20 MP3-capable players at Best Buy (the cost of which probably includes Fraunhofer's obligatory graft money!)-- clearly, MP3 capability isn't difficult to add to existing CD transport technology.
Given that the big names were colossally embarrassed-- both financially and technologically-- by the flood of out-of-nowheres like iRiver and Sonic Blue three or four years back, you'd think they'd be making an attempt to clear their names and wipe the nobodies off the map with the quickness. Instead, they offer us only marginal, extremely limited attempts at implementation and only the slightest (and often broken) promise of improved mechanical reliability.
Then again, maybe we should consider ourselves "lucky" that the perpetually-in-the-middle Sony is offering an MP3-capable player at all, let alone that it works without forcing us to go via ATRAC or some ridiculous "secured" medium. (I guess they've learned their lesson on that front, at least.)
I wish I could say the NE510 was worth every penny. It is pretty good, at least by comparison to the available alternatives. I'd certainly choose it over Panasonic's offerings. But for $70, even with Sony's advertising budget in mind, it should be able to play MP3 tracks without gaps and show me a heck of a lot more information on-screen than it does. I hope that they can finally get it right with the next crop of portables. It's far past high time that someone got MP3 CDs right, after all. Are you listening, Sony?
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 70
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
lossf
|
|
Reviews written: 5
Trusted by: 0 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.