Best MP3 Player for Sound Quality? +2gb

Big Kev · 20 Mar 2008 at 20:38

My old man has just bought the NWZA818 for £75 delivered to go with my old set of E500's, so he should end up with some superb sound quality there, not bad for a 66 year old to get the audio bug.

C64 · 20 Mar 2008 at 20:41

The crossroads mylarone x3i you can get for £28 from singapore and they punch way above their weight certainly as good as any £70-£100 phones around the net.

james.miller · 20 Mar 2008 at 22:11

C64 said:
The crossroads mylarone x3i you can get for £28 from singapore and they punch way above their weight certainly as good as any £70-£100 phones around the net.

lol. whilst we could debate which earphones are the best (and i said £70-80. you spent £28, you could have got something even better), that really isnt the subject of the thread.

Dont forget either that the d2, like a lot of other mp3 players, is rather picky about low impedance earphones and by that i mean <32ohm. it has particular problems with the likes of the ex90's which are 16omh earphones. the result is a bass roll-off starting at around 50hz. VERY noticable when you are using earphones with a decent bottom end.

look at this picture. what you are seeing is a responce that's almost perfectly linier without earphones connected (blue line), but that changes when you connect some 16ohm earphones to it. what you then see, is a response thats is already 6db down at 30hz (white and green lines) which is a hardware problem and cant be fully fixed with software. the sonys do not suffer from this problem.

this is my own testing btw. this was one of the reasons i asked on iaudiophile for a long time to try to get cowan to give us a software eq that was adjustable enough to set a point at say..20hz and boost it to try to at least flaten that response. for the enitre time i had the d2, and even now, nearly a year later, there is no way to boost frequences at 30hz or under on the d2. so that problem remains unfixed.

Vegetarian · 21 Mar 2008 at 01:05

james.miller said:
yes. the problem is when you turn the bass up, i cant even remember what its called right now, it limits it down to as much as volume 18 which im sorry, but it isnt enough enough unless you have a sensitive pair of cans or earphones. if you cant hear the artifacts caused by the agressive volume limiting around that volume level even before you hear the volume limiting itself then you must be deaf

thats worrying. the nwz-a series are quoted at something like 8mw per channel. it certainly isnt a lot, and itss not enough to provide a clean line-level signal to drive an amplifier, not even at volume 30 with the equaliser defeated. from memory, the vision m can do it fine? put it this way, its a far way off the power levels of the cowan D2

You really should know that numbers mean nothing.... Its real world usage that matters - I think the Sony is actually 5mw per channel and the Zen is 30mw etc. Sony is painfully loud at times. Do you remember those HiFi's in the 80's and 90's that had 500Watts outputs lol. My £2000 hifi (rega and marantz ki sig setup) only has 50 Watts - again anything over 11 o clock is deafening. Point taken.

Re volume limiting - Ive only ever noticed anything while playing Mindfields - with bass up max and volume set at over 27... even then it was so minor most of the popluation would not hear it - it didnt distort. There is a funtion on the Sony to nomerlize music output so it basicly makes quiet passages loud and vica verca. Im sure you have this funcion on! The sony is a bassheads dream anyway... no other player can punch out bass like the 818... makes my iRiver sound thin! Artifacts caused by agressive volume limiting... you really need to RMA your mp3 player mate

Out of all the mp3 players Ive owned ( Ive had every make) the sony has the least amount of artifacts... Creative and iRiver were the worst of the major brands. The 818 is very forgiving of the badly encoded mp3 yet shines with Lame VBR V0.

Running the sony thru an amp I use flat eq - it really sounds the best. However, thru headphones I do eq a lot. I have a pair of Westone UM2's, Sony EX85 and EX90's.

I love how you think Im deaf - Im a pro musician with 4 degree's in music - I trust my ears and not yours - anyway I think most forum members would have to agree

You really need to get away from your numbers and charts as they are purely accademic and useless... Amerture musicians often fall into this trap of quoting numbers, charts and reciting from books. Sorry for being harsh on you, but just use your ears.

manic111 · 21 Mar 2008 at 01:06

Im kind of having a scout round to replace my D2-never quite got on with the touchscreen controls (had an Iaudio 7 before that which broke). The Sony looks great, but I would like something with a larger flash memory (not HD, use it in the gym!). Do you know if Sony are planning on releasing a 16GB version?

james.miller · 21 Mar 2008 at 09:27

. the charts backed up what i said about the d2, not the other way around - i didnt base my findings on them. read my review on here, i was one of the first in the uk with one. read my opinions on head-fi or iaudiophile.
as far as the sony goes im sorry but.....what charts and numbers? *I* havent even done any measurements with it and i never mentioned distortion either, thats the one thing it doesnt do......

james.miller said:
but it isnt enough enough unless you have a sensitive pair of cans or earphones. if you cant hear the artifacts caused by the agressive volume limiting around that volume level even before you hear the volume limiting itself then you must be deaf

there are artifacts caused by the agressive VLS, that are always in the same frequency region. you can hear those before you hear the VLS working and reducing the output.

I love how you think Im deaf - Im a pro musician with 4 degree's in music - I trust my ears and not yours - anyway I think most forum members would have to agree You really need to get away from your numbers and charts as they are purely accademic and useless... Amerture musicians often fall into this trap of quoting numbers, charts and reciting from books. Sorry for being harsh on you, but just use your ears.

im sure its fine for you to think im deaf though, right? i can hear problems evidently you cant and no, before you say anything, it isnt a fault with my sony mp3 player, all of them i've heard (5 so far) from the range do it. i suggest you stop trying to use this numbers excuse and start listening.
Sorry to be harsh, but your opinionated stubborness annoys me some times, especially as you dont bother to interpret the posts you're replying to correctly. well you wont be doing it to me. ill quote it again:

james.miller said:
the problem is when you turn the bass up, i cant even remember what its called right now, it limits it down to as much as volume 18 which im sorry, but it isnt enough enough unless you have a sensitive pair of cans or earphones

i dont care if your a musician or not. i know what im hearing. this is the last of our discussion on the subject unill a do a proper review, which will back up everything ive said as always

manic111 said:
Im kind of having a scout round to replace my D2-never quite got on with the touchscreen controls (had an Iaudio 7 before that which broke). The Sony looks great, but I would like something with a larger flash memory (not HD, use it in the gym!). Do you know if Sony are planning on releasing a 16GB version?

yep sure are - the nwz-a829

it has bluetooth built in as well, very handy for the gym!

SexyGreyFox · 21 Mar 2008 at 09:42

Vegetarian said:
I love how you think Im deaf - Im a pro musician with 4 degree's in music - I trust my ears and not yours -

I've been a pro/semi pro musician for 38 years with an equivalent of 9.5 degrees of working experience but I know for a fact that my ears are shot through standing in front of very loud bands.
Bit of a wild claim you're making there.

Bigsy · 21 Mar 2008 at 11:12

I've seen a few people speak of this volume limiting when using a lot of bass on the 818, I certainly have not been able to reproduce this on my 618. And it certainly isn't underpowered in general, it's louder than all my other players, even a sammy yh-j70 which is 'rated' at 60mw, probably why ratings should be ignored and quoting them is just meaningless.

What I'm getting at is that I don't think there is any issue with the Sony power/volume, in fact I think its better than 90% of the players out there....But of course it isn't as powerful as the D2 as cowon have massive outputs in comparison to everything else.

As for 818 vs D2 it's apples and oranges imo, both have excellent SQ so we can put that fact to one side....

Whats your overiding priority?
You like warm sound? Get the sony, cold? Get the D2.
Codec support? Get D2.
Tactile buttons? Get Sony.
High ohm cans? Get D2.
Watch Video? Get D2.
Poor? Get Sony... etc etc.

P.S I'm not a pro musician and have as many as 0 degrees in music, so feel free to ignore my obviously worthless opinion.

james.miller · 21 Mar 2008 at 11:21

no Bigsy, what you've said is quite right. the are two very different sounding players so it really is down to preference. i've not listened to a 61x player so i cant really comment on that

regarding the cowans outputs, it is a powerful mp3 player. however, even the d2 is overrated. one of the guys did a test over at iaudiophile and its output was well below 50mw. its good enough for a decent line out and of course, being able to drive just about any headphones you like. its just a shame about the bass rolloff that i mentioned. i dont like over powering bass but i do like it to extend down past 20hz. -6db at 30hz is shockingly bad really, but not unexpected when similar players perform the same.

Hxc · 21 Mar 2008 at 12:02

If you care about audio quality why on earth are you EQing the bass up to max? Surely that defeats the point of "quality" entirely.

Bigsy · 21 Mar 2008 at 14:33

So you can't have good quality bassy music now?

I care about sound quality and I have my 618 treble EQ'ed up to max, bass 1 below max and megabass on full, and it sounds fantastic through my bassy E500's.

I like to enjoy my fun sounding music, I don't buy into the flat, sterile, lifeless, anti EQ, audiophile brigade nonsense.

Vegetarian · 21 Mar 2008 at 14:55

Ive managed to recreate the volume limiting problem on the 818 that james.miller talks about - its the "dynamic Normaliser" turn it off and enjoy a full unlimited sound. Oddly on my sony 805, Dynamic Normaliser does not have any problems.

james.miller · 21 Mar 2008 at 15:13

no it is not! :rolleyes:

you know what normalisation does and this has nothing to do with it.

Bigsy · 21 Mar 2008 at 15:19

I have all my music normalised to 89db, enabling dynamic normaliser seems to increase the volume of my music.

james.miller · 21 Mar 2008 at 15:23

all the dynamic normaliser does is bring the volume of the quiet passages up to that of the louder parts. it may be of use to somebody but for music its largely a waste of time. music these days is either already so heavily normalised at the stuid that it doesnt warrent doing, or its very dynamic and so turning this on destroys those dynamics. however, it can be useful if your in a loud environment with open headphones are earphones that dont cancel out noise very well

Hxc · 21 Mar 2008 at 17:24

Bigsy said:
So you can't have good quality bassy music now?

I care about sound quality and I have my 618 treble EQ'ed up to max, bass 1 below max and megabass on full, and it sounds fantastic through my bassy E500's.

I like to enjoy my fun sounding music, I don't buy into the flat, sterile, lifeless, anti EQ, audiophile brigade nonsense.

Never said that you can't have quality bassy music, I like it myself, but generally pushing bass up so high will comprimize the quality somewhere. Some audiophiles are against EQ as it distorts the way the music was originally recorded, although a lot of them realize (read head fi, people stay away from zunes because of the lack of eq) that with a lot of portable players you do need EQ to get the best sound out of them.

Also, what music do you listen to that sounds good with MegaBass on? I've never found a single track that doesn't sound boomy and ridiculus with it on.