Sony X Series Walkman

I spent hours on the phone with Sony. I spent an hour on the phone with Slacker. I sent my Sony X in and got it replaced. Still I could not connect to Slacker though I did get internet connection and… youtube. Now I'm battling to get a refund from Slacker since all I wanted the account for was this Walkman. Sound quality of the X is fantastic but that's really the only good quality. There really are not any other useful features. I'm not an iPod supporter but I wish I would have gotten the iTouch.

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Amazon advertises 100 free downloads, but fails to deliver. There is supposed to be a card in the box with an ID number for Sony's website. No card in box. When I called Amazon, they stated that I may… have received old stock. I asked if they would exchange it for what I ordered. They stated that they have no control on what comes out of their warehouse. Customer service was frustrating, due to being passed around for close to an hour. I finally gave up. The player, however is excellent and easy to use.

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I buy portable players for sound quality first. If you use good headphones this player sound quality is NOT good at all. I have no idea how some think this player sounds good. They perhaps were so impressed… by the functionality (which is excellent) and/or use low quality files and poor earphones. Also this player is noisy. I have used many portable players. The old Creative Zen and Zen vision M are the 2 best for sound quality. The classic Ipod is noisy but has good frequency extension. The Zune is not as noisy but just does not have as rich or frequency extension on the top end.

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I bought this player after reading every review on amazon and looking at all the other potential brands. First off the reason I wanted a potable music player. I have around 700+ CD's that I own that reside… in my two 400 disc CD changer's in my home system. All these CD's have also been ripped into Window's Media Player on my laptop which runs on Vista 64bit. The format I ripped them with is WMA. I-Pod's don't support the WMA format. So that ruled out I-Pods right off the bat along with the fact that a friend of mine horror story of how I-Tunes crashed their new Vista run Laptop to the point it had to be sent back to the manufacture. So that didn't leave me with many option. I want all my music which is about 28GB's on a single small portable player. I really like Sony products in general I have all ways had good luck with them. So I went with this player. I wish they offered one with more memory because after it is formatted and I loaded it with my music it only has about 1.5GB's left. Alot of people have complained about the uploading process and how it didn't work or whatever. I took another reviewers advice and did not use the software disc that came with the player. If you run some form a Windows and have the current version of Windows Media Player I think its 11 your fine. If you don't have the current version of WMP the included disc comes with it and you just have to download it off the disc. Also a very important thing I learned from the same reviewer is that the player lists the artist as the person listed in the contributing artist field of WMP. So I went through my entire music collection on WMP and about 70% were fine but almost all rap CD's had to be changed. You have to put the Name of the artist as the first name in the contributiing artist field for every song. If you don't when doing a search on the player by artist you will have names of people you didn't know you owned because their name was listed first in the field and when you click on their name it will only show the song their listed first on which may only be one or more. When you first plug in the player into the computer the computer recognizes it and asks you to format it or sync it or something DON'T DO THAT. Hit cancel or no or whatever. Then all you have to do is open WMP and on the top right click on the Sync tab highlight the Walkman tab and then click the Start Sync tab. That's it. It took mine a very long time to do this first Sync about 10 hours. But I had 28Gigs worth of music. Since then I have made some changes to artwork and Genre info to my liking for some of my CD's. I have also added several new CD's and it only takes any where from less than a minute to a couple of minutes to Sync. Everyhting is on the player all artwork song names artist everything made it first try with no problems. Even the small percentage of my music which is from burned CD's that I got from other people that I ripped into WMP transfered right to the player no problem artwork song names everything. As long as you see it in WMP you will see it in the player. I have read alot of reviews of pretty much every other brands players that don't do that. Video is not important to me so I have yet to try that on this player. Slacker works great on this player and provides art work and artist bio's. The touch screen works great. The touch screen looks amazing it looks like HD. The wireless internet search engine works fine. Music quality is astounding and has a full customizable eq. with several presets and two personallized ones. As a portable music player I think the Sony Walkman X Series is outstanding.

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I won't repeat what others have said; but there was one reviewer of the S9 that was berated b/c he switched to the Walkman, and said part of his reason was the user interface of the Korean based S9 was… awkward to say the least. Well he was right! I am a Cowon fan, and for those of you that don't know; they make the most format flexible, audiophile sounding MP3 players in the world. I have also tried the S9 at the same time of purchasing the Walkman. The S9 is going back! They are the Gold standard of sound and liscense a professional equalizer BBE. I read one review that said the Walkman X sound, was equal to the S9 except for having a crisper narrower soundstage, on the high end. However if you liked the other then the Sony goes head to head in equality. I agree with this. So more than my opinion; the Sony sound is impeccable. I have used noise cancellation for years, and their implementation with their headphones is very good. The interface for the player overall is simple, clean, reliable; just superb. This is probably the first MP3 player I have owned in 10 years, I finally feel works well, and is very pretty, sexy, fun, just enjowable to use. By the way when I tested the sound, I used no equalizer except for the default, and the included headphones as well as some audiophile headphones. The radio works well; You tube and Wifi are excellent, but the music rocks. With the headphone included, the NC function this player is worth it! I recently read about the Sony A series Walkman players due to debut in about 30 days. While pretty and going as higgh as 64 Gig flash; they lack the touch screen and other functions I mentioned. So for the features I mentioned, the walkman X is a new gold standard! I hope Sony listens, they havea winner! By the way, many reviews have put the touch interface up against the IPOD touch, the gold standard for touch, NOT sound. Their results and mine, the Walkman X raises the bar! better thab the Ipod Touch! U will enjoy this player, no mistake, like screen and sound issues that plague the Zune and Creatixe Zen Xfi. Sony Rocks! By the way, I have tried to address all the negatives I have heard about Sony, and de-myth them. One last one. One site says the Walkman output is only 5 watt perchannel and Cowon is 17. Not true, the measure are different. In actaul tests, the Walkman powers the Bose, included headphones, and Denheiser equal or better in some cases than Cowon. PS If you play high Bit rate files, keep the screen bright and on a lot, the battery life is lower than rated, this is normal, and also fine for daily use.

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