Sony HD5/HD5H - The Good & The Bad

[shadowritten]

Anyone care to contribute?

For me ...

The Good:

Gapless playback with ATRAC3Plus

Astounding battery life (removable, too!)

Bright, crisp sound quality, good all-round definition and ample bass

Tiny file sizes (ATRAC3Plus @ 64kbps), leading to more CDs on a 30GB drive

'New Tracks' function - very useful indeed after a small transfer of new music

Overall dimensions - surprisingly small and effortlessly portable

Looks - beats most DAPs for me


The Bad:

Limit of 60 characters per field (artist, album, etc) on player

Faulty Repeat OFF function (for me and some others, it's proving ...)

No renamable playlists-on-the-go

No track or album queueing facility

Very faint hiss when playing (but only at the lowest possible levels)

Easily scratched screen

And - for some at least - cracking buttons!


Who's next?

[JohnG]

I'm not a HD5 owner but having read most posts in here I would think that SonicStage would get placed in the thumbs down list by many owners !

[shadowritten]

Certainly, SonicStage isn't the best written bit of SW in the world, but it does the job it's designed to do. Compared to Creative's MediaSource, it is actually more intuitive. MediaSource is, shall we say, more forgiving than SS, but is very confusing to use as a beginner. SS is at least logical in its GUI, following a nice left-to-right progression from ripping/importing/purchasing tracks to storing them in a library to finally transferring or burning them. Dare I say it, SS is every bit as intuitive (note this word carefully) as iTunes IMO.

[Hrochnick]

I agree shadowritten. I use SonicStage without any problems at all (certainly with no more complaints than I would have with any piece of software, there's always room for improvement) and can't really understand what all the moans are about. It's easy to use, logical, doesn't crash. It rips my cd's well, organises the files in straightforward manner and transfers them to my player quickly without any problems. What more do you need?

Is slagging it off just the 'in thing' to do?

[clivem2]

Me too, no issues with SonicStage, can't understand what all the fuss is about.

[Sasso]

Same here, sonicstage is pretty good. My problem is with my computer being so slow (P3) and usb 1.1 it takes ages to rip songs and transfer them but i don't think its the software's fault. My computer sits there for about 15 or so minutes at 100% CPU Usage while it rips a cd. Don't bother doing something while its ripping because it will take even longer.....
Just one annoying thing is the limited things you can do with the library on the actual HD5....you don't have all the options that are in the computer's library. And changing something takes ages to write it...but could just be usb1.1
Hopefully Sonicstage 3.2 is as good as people have been talking about. (On the minidisk forums)

[mrflabby]

I completely agree. Slagging off Sonystage IS the thing to do. I have no problems with it.
I had never used iTunes and the other day I had to help my father in law with his new Ipod photo 60GB and it was a struggle. I didn't find it intuitive at all. It must be very good for pop music (playlists etc.) but as a classical music listener I find SS a great piece of software.

I must admit that it's a bit slow on my PIII 500 though.

[shadowritten]

Only time I've had a problem was the other night - just froze on me for no reason. Perhaps 'cos I've been bigging it up on here so much!