Well, after just two days I am sending my NW HD3 back. Perhaps it's my own fault because I had read on this forum some of the problems but I thought that it probably on affected a few people and I would be fine.
I wasn't.
There were a whole load of niggly little problems that I could just about live with but I had 2 that were imho showstoppers.
1. Sonic Stage
Yup, it's a fairly un-friendly bit of software but I could live with that. What I couldn't live with was the fact that after I installed it it would run once fine (as fine as it could do) and but if I closed it and then tried to start it up again it wouldn't start. Just went through the startup and dumped be back to the desktop without an error message. If I re-installed the software then the same would happen again. Would start fine once, but not again.
2. Background hiss
There is background hiss on all the tracks. That's using the supplied ear-phones. Perhaps there wouldn't be if I used different phones but I'm not going to even experiment given the problems above.
To cap it all I just spent half an hour on the phone to Sony and they couldn't help and just suggested the problem was with my PC.
If you've got an HD3 and haven't got these problems then congratulations - it's a nice bit of kit. But given my experiences, which seems to echo what other people have found, then I suspect that Sony have dropped the ball on this one.
The only question is - what do I get instead?
I wasn't.
There were a whole load of niggly little problems that I could just about live with but I had 2 that were imho showstoppers.
1. Sonic Stage
Yup, it's a fairly un-friendly bit of software but I could live with that. What I couldn't live with was the fact that after I installed it it would run once fine (as fine as it could do) and but if I closed it and then tried to start it up again it wouldn't start. Just went through the startup and dumped be back to the desktop without an error message. If I re-installed the software then the same would happen again. Would start fine once, but not again.
2. Background hiss
There is background hiss on all the tracks. That's using the supplied ear-phones. Perhaps there wouldn't be if I used different phones but I'm not going to even experiment given the problems above.
To cap it all I just spent half an hour on the phone to Sony and they couldn't help and just suggested the problem was with my PC.
If you've got an HD3 and haven't got these problems then congratulations - it's a nice bit of kit. But given my experiences, which seems to echo what other people have found, then I suspect that Sony have dropped the ball on this one.
The only question is - what do I get instead?