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Sony NW-A3000 review
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By Sindre Lia, Friday 13 January 2006  
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Have we met before? Don't tell me - you're the NW-A3000 everyone's been talking about! Join Sindre Lia as he works his charm on one of the slickest looking audio players around.Sony NW-A3000
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Featuring a 2" OLED screen and 20 GB hard drive, the Sony NW-A3000 certainly has first impressions going for it; a translucent acrylic coating creates the illusion that the front of the unit is one huge display. At 104 x 65 x 21 mm and 182 g it's a quite heavy lift - but fortunately comes bundled with a carrying pouch to protect its extremely scratch-prone surface. The spitting image (only larger) of its little brother, the Sony NW-A1000, the player improves greatly on the design of previous HDD-based audio players from Sony - in fact, we found it to be the most stylish-looking audio player we've reviewed to date alongside the NW-A1000.
When connected to a computer via its USB 2.0 cable, the Sony NW-A3000 acts like a mass storage device. For music files to be imported into the NW-A3000's music library, however, it's required to transfer them via the bundled 'Connect Player' software. Unfortunately, as with so many homegrown music managers, the software is only of average quality at best. On a more positive note, the NW-A3000 supports MP3 files in the true sense of the word, as well as WMA, ATRAC3 and ATRAC3+ audio formats.
Furthermore, the NW-A3000 sports a bright and clear OLED screen, well-placed navigation and action buttons as well as a comfortable button for delightfully hassle-free volume adjusment. The icon based menu interface didn't harbour the most intuitive icons we've seen, however, and the player also exhibited intermittent latency issues when accessing the hard drive. Advanced features mitigates this to some extent, though, including the Artist Link feature which offers quick access to related music.
An Equalizer has also been incorporated, offering 4 preset modes including Heavy, Pop, Jazz and Unique, as well as two custom modes. When connecting the bundled set of earphones to the NW-A3000, we immediately discovered some slightly annoying background hissing. The equalizer also needed some adjustment to add some bass to the sound image - which otherwise proved well-rounded. Connecting a set of third party earphones yielded quite an improvement in bass, and positively the NW-A3000 also offers great loudness.
Sony claims a battery life of up to 35 hours for the NW-A3000; chop this in half, and you'll get what we were able to squeeze out of the player during our test period.
Availability
The Sony NW-A3000 is currently available in Europe and North America, bearing price tags of approximately €300 EUR and $300 USD, respectively.
Sony
Conclusion
Sharing the stylish looks of the NW-A1000, the Sony NW-A3000 steals the attention wherever it goes. It does have its drawbacks, as evidenced by challenging interaction with the onboard music library and a mild case of obesity, but these irks are fortunately mitigated by good battery life and high quality audio output - provided a proper set of earphones are used. Those not in need of fancy multimedia features but rather decent music playback and good looks will find the NW-A3000 a very good choice indeed.
What's positive:
Object of desire; very good sound quality with proper earphones; good battery life
What's negative:
Expensive; heavy; sub-par music library interaction; scratch-prone
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