Useful Consumer Review

Sony has a newish version of their “sporty” headphones branded “Walkman” (or “NWZ-W273”).  They have a built-in mp3 player.  I’ve got big headphones with built-in mp3 players, but it would be nice to have a pair in a more convenient form factor.

I bought the previous Sony iteration, but they were huge and fell out of my ears all the time, so they were basically unusable.  This version is much smaller, so *crosses fingers*.

They come with an impressive number of very small manuals.

They also  come with a pretty big cradle (heavier than the headphones). You have to plug the Walkman into the cradle to charge them and transfer data to them.  The cradle is symmetrical, but the headphones have to be put in the right direction, so I got it wrong the two first times.  Tsk, tsk.  Bad design.

Apparently the Walkman doesn’t want me to write anything to the built-in storage in anything but utf8.  When rsyncing to it I get errors like

rsync: mkstemp "/run/media/larsi/WALKMAN/MUSIC/Prize/.06-Ex 
  Pregui\#347a.mp3.vrixrA" failed: Invalid argument (22)

rsync can do anything, though:

[larsi@building ~]$ rsync -av --iconv=utf8,iso88591 \
  --exclude '*.flac' \
  "stories:/music/repository/Arto\\ Lindsay/Prize" \
  /run/media/larsi/WALKMAN/MUSIC/

So what’s the sound quality like?  Surely the Walkman should be charged now after I’ve typed all this…

Geez, there are a lot of teensy weensy buttons on this this…  Ok, after studying it under a magnifying glass, I managed to switch it on.  Oh, nice.  There’s a nice lady telling me what button I just hit.  “Shuffle.”  “Shuffle.  Off.”  She sounds like she’s an actress in a sci-fi tv series.  A slight metallic tinge.

Oh, sound.  Hey, it sounds pretty nice.  There’s quite a lot of bass.  I had never imagined that teensy headphones like this would have so much bass and such “big room” feeling.

There’s a slight hiss if you pump the volume up beyond what’s comfortable.

They block out a lot of external sound.  Since these are in-ear, you end up listening to yourself breathing a bit.  But overall, these are way better than I had thought was possible.

And I tried headbanging a bit now, and they don’t fall out of my ears.  Wow!

Hm…  so there’s buttons to skip to the next/previous track.  And if you press them a longer time, they skip to the next directory!  That’s perfect for skipping to the next album.  Very nice.  Hm.  But when you switch them off and then on again, it starts playing at the start of the current song instead of continuing from where you left off.  That really sucks for listening to podcasts and the like.

But overall I’m really impressed.  I’ll probably start hating them once I start using them for real, but right now, I’m loving them.