Product Reviews

Sony invented the Walkman, and it changed the way we listen to music. And recently, with much fanfare, it's launched two new 'solid state' players. Neither has any moving parts. Instead, they use just electronics to store and play hi-fi quality music, like MP3 players - but different, as we'll see. Sony has made great claims about its new babies. So, are we witnessing the dawn of another era?

As you would expect coming from Sony, each device is cool, tiny and lovely - real status symbols. The MS-7 is beautifully petite and the NW-3 is even smaller! This is because its 64Mb of RAM is built-in, sacrificing upgradability for compactness.

The MS-7 gets its name from the 64Mb Memory Stick that actually takes up most of its length. The player only takes white 'MagiGate'-compliant sticks, a copyright system explained below. This amount of memory lets you store up to two hours of music at the lowest quality setting, but only an hour at the highest.

Technically, these aren't MP3 players, because they use Sony's ATRAC3 music encoding format. It's a variant of the compression technology that Sony has used to great effect with MiniDisc. They can still play MP3s, but these must first be converted into ATRAC3.

This means that if you have a stash of MP3s from Napster, (naughty, naughty), you'll have to convert the lot into ATRAC3. This process takes around 51 seconds per five-minute track, but also tends to clutter up your hard disk. Additionally, the software

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has a tendency not to 'see' MP3s that have been encoded at 160Kbit/s.

So why has Sony gone for such an irritating system? ATRAC3 certainly produces better sounding recordings when you're copying straight from a CD. It won't, however, make your existing MP3s sound better. The real reason is copy protection.

Sony, as a music publisher, takes the possibility of its bread and butter being nicked seriously. As a result, both players use OpenMG software for encoding music. And it makes you jump through hoops. Each time you copy a file to and from the player, it's 'checked in' or 'checked out', and a digital watermark is applied.

Thanks to this system you can only 'check out' a song to your player three times. When this number of copies has been reached, you have to 'check in' again - and you can only do this onto the PC you 'checked out' on. Now, I'm all for protecting copyrights, but this is corporate mind control gone mad. It's hard not to resent it.

Once you've navigated the red tape and actually have some ATRAC3 tracks to listen to, using both devices is fairly pleasurable. Sound quality is excellent, though a tad thin compared to MiniDisc. The supplied headphones, however, are awful. With bizarrely long wires, they seem to have been designed to fit an ear that isn't human.

The MS-7 has a jog-dial for skipping between tracks, while the NW-3 looks and operates just like Sony's MiniDisc portable remote controls. Sensibly, both use speedy USB to get tracks on board. On the MS-7, the port is on a bolt-on pack, which also serves as the recharge connector. The NW-3, on the other hand, is a complete unit incorporating an AAA battery. We prefer the rechargeable NiMH of the MS-7. Either way, the battery life of around 5-6 hours for both units is annoyingly short.

Both are desirable little music players, offering excellent sound quality. But the combination of high price and dodgy software makes it impossible to recommend either. My advice: if you're serious about high-quality music on the move, buy a MiniDisc player.