Amazon.com.au:Customer reviews: Sony NW-A55/B Walkman NW-A55 Hi-Res 16GB MP3 Player, Grayish Black

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SdeGat

FM Radio does not play on Bluetooth

Reviewed in Canada on 12 May 2020

Verified Purchase

Bought this device as it seems to do everything that I needed including the FM receiver.
The problem is that if you want/need to switch between (internal) music and FM radio while connected to a bluetooth device (earphones or speakers), you cannot. FM does not play over the bluetooth connection.
In my case, this was a show stopper.
Note that the device volume control does not (either) work on/with the bluetooth connection.
You have to ensure that your bluetooth earbuds or speaker has a volume control.

5 people found this helpful

popeyeiseye

Sloppy packaging

Reviewed in Canada on 21 July 2020

Verified Purchase

Nice little unit , unfortunately left to bounce aroung the box it was sent in , improperly packaged .

Now I have to monitor the unit closely for any damages to the electronics !

NOT IMPRESSED AT ALL !!!

Addendum : working Fine , Nice Clean Tunes , no Problems , so far, 6 August 2020

2 people found this helpful

Richard

Un son excellent mais un software penible

Reviewed in Canada on 11 September 2020

Colour: Grayish BlackVerified Purchase

Le son des sony on toujours été des meilleurs à mon point de vue malgré que j'ai connu mieux du coté logiciel. Le logiciel pour PC n'est pas complexe à utiliser mais celui ci ne fonctionne pas à la hauteur des attentes. Il est parfois pénible d'y ajouter des pistes avec le logiciel. J'ai connu mieux coté performance de la part de Sony. Il y a mieux chez la compétition même du coté sonore... Hiby R3

One person found this helpful

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Michel Bédard

Durée de vie de la batterie

Reviewed in Canada on 11 November 2020

Verified Purchase

Contrairement à ce qui est annoncé la batterie ne dure que 5 ou 6 heures même en n'activant pas les ajustements du son que permet l'appareil. Décevant de la part de Sony car l'appareil sinon est de bonne qualité

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Gary C. Woodward

A wonderful player saddled with terrible software

Reviewed in the United States on 29 October 2020

Colour: Grayish BlackVerified Purchase

This is a terrific Hi Res player with great sound and controls that are easy to use. I've tried several hi res players with limited success. This is by far the best, with controls that make sense and extra EQ features that some may like. Sony is not new to the game of designing small players, and it shows. The build quality is good and the external controls respond predictably. I can't say enough about how well it sounds, especially upconverting music by re-recording them to more accurate FLAC files.

It's dismaying to report that the software to support this player, Sony Music Center for PC, is a complete disaster. It is usually straightforward in accepting downloads on the computer. But once you decide to shift those over to the player, the nightmare starts. It seems to randomly select additional recent downloads to transfer again. Sometimes I have to take 100 or more duplicate tracks off the list of potential "new" transfers. And there are no commands that I can discover that will shorten this process, other than to uncheck each redundant track one at a time. Others have mentioned this problem of not being able to manage duplicates. But it is even worse than it sounds. Can a major builder of consumer electronics really not notice that their software is so dysfunctional?

Beware, too, that this software does not strictly sync your player. The player will hold on to things that have been deleted on the Music Center for PC library. They, too, need to be taken off the player one track at a time.

Having known what I know now, I might have still purchased the player but hoped for using a better music management system. How many player functions might be lost in the process is something I do not know.

Overall, I've never seen such useful hardware left to flounder with such dysfunctional software. I'm stunned that Sony puts its name on Music Center for PC.

3 people found this helpful

dman

Amazing sound quality .

Reviewed in the United States on 13 October 2020

Verified Purchase

First of all I love Sony period. Been a fan since the eighties and I own at least 5 products now from this company, which by the way has lasted me for years. When it comes to sound quality there are few that can hold a candle to sony and this model is no exception. The sound is beautifully balanced and clear with mids, treble and bass on point especially if you use the clear audio setting. If you start with quality tracks sony will not let you down ever and even the not so good tracks will sound at least decent with this player. However settings such as vinyl and analog tube reproduction I think are not reallly needed here, also when you use them there's not a big difference in my opinion. Also there is no gapless playback setting at all which I think is a travesty especially for the asking price of this player, I own a player right now that I paid less than $40 dollars for and it has amazing gapless playback. This and the fact that you can't use an already used micro sd card was the deal breaker for me, I love sony but I don't think it's worth the $200 price tag. Great sound as always but misses the mark as a whole.

One person found this helpful

Don B. Walker

Sony Can Do Better, Surely!

Reviewed in the United States on 4 January 2021

Verified Purchase

This music player is not what I had hoped for. I was encourage to buy an MP3 player after using Apple iPods, iPod Touches, iPhones and iPads for almost 20 years. The Apple devices REQUIRE iTunes and that is the only reason I wanted to get another player. I tried some of the cheap MP3 players but they were not worth using. So I decided to go with Sony and all that I read about the NW-A55 was glowing and that the sound was unbelievable, so I took the plunge. I purchased the unit for my Christmas present and on Christmas morning with my new Sony player along with the Sony MDR-XB50AP Extra Bass ear buds I was ready to enjoy a great musical Christmas. To my surprise the sound was not good and can be outdone by any of the seven Apple devices that I own.
Player Review:
Pros: (1) Built good, (2) full of features, (3) easy access to songs and albums, (4) iTunes NOT required to load song files, (5) free app "Music Center for PC" works great but not required, (6) songs can be loaded onto the player with just Windows Explorer, (7) you can create your own folder system [artist-album].
Cons: (1) The sound has too much treble and not enough bass. This is still true when I use Extra Bass ear buds and an equalizer setting that has the bass at the max and the treble at the minimum. The graph is a diagonal line running from the left top to the right bottom. All other setting on the unit will remove the little bass I have and add treble to the sound. (2) I was also disappointed that the song info window will not display the "comment" tag for song files. It does show a lot of the other tags and MP3 settings.
I am considering returning the player. Even though I only paid $168 for it and they will cost you $218 now (a month later). I am still looking for a better way of listening to the player that will give better bass (headphones, external speakers). If I can then I will keep the player since I only paid $168 for the unit. Inclosing, I cannot listen to music on this device with the high pitch sound so I am hoping some how to find that wonderful sound that Sony promised me.

L. Holman

Good sound; decent interface; terrible file uploading process

Reviewed in the United States on 6 January 2021

Colour: Grayish BlackVerified Purchase

This unit sounds very good and enabled me to get music off my phone, freeing up much-needed memory space. Features are pretty good, sony operating system is all right, bluetooth works fine with all my devices.

The difficulty for me came in the loading process. It took me DAYS and many, MANY failed attempts to get all my files on the 256 GB card that I got to go along with this. I was able to get all my albums on the card on first try, but about a fifth to a quarter of the albums had no cover art...I had to go through my itunes library, reload the cover art for the offending files by copying/deleting/pasting/resaving in itunes (this took much trial and error to figure out), and then reload the files to the walkman.

Second MAJOR issue - after manually deleting unneeded files on the walkman, upon reconnecting to the computer and reloading music, the sd card would not mount in the unit after unmounting the walkman from the computer, necessitating reformatting/starting over. Can't speak to those using PC computers, maybe it works better for you guys. This was very frustrating.

Third issue: the walkman and/or computer would freeze if trying to upload my entire 247 GB library; subsequently, if loading very large chunks of data, a very large amount (30-40 GB) of "unknown" data would show up on the walkman that COULD NOT be deleted, thereby necessitating yet more reformats of the sd card and more starting over again, so that I would have enough room for everything. My workaround (again thru trial and error) was to load music a little at a time by alphabetical sections, keeping individual loading operations to a lower file count...all this, a very large PITA.

The upside to all this is, my music library has been cleaned up and edited several times over by now. However, ALL the files originally showed cover art on my iphones. The Sony operating system imho has some real problems with it as it corrupts data on sd cards when using editing operations ON THE WALKMAN'S OS. Your music files had better be in perfect order before loading on the walkman/sd card. Even so, I couldn't discern any pattern to why some albums had cover art and others did not, and I can't understand why deleting files on the walkman causes sd card data corruption. I would recommend not using this feature, and just leaving any extraneous files on the card if you are using a card and don't need the space.

Bottom line: I am pretty happy with the unit (finally) but getting my music/art on it was extremely tedious and time-consuming, with the quirky sony OS. If you aren't a stickler for cover art and just want your music to play you probably won't have these issues.

Chris Zema

Underwhelming

Reviewed in the United States on 9 September 2020

Colour: Grayish BlackVerified Purchase

I guess I don't know what I was expecting. I have used audio on my phone for as long as I can remember. My goal was to move the power drain from my phone and onto another device. I have never had a problem with any Sony device and I guess I still do not. However, the player is just blah. It is very small in height and width, but surprisingly thick. There are very few control choices on the touch screen. I was probably looking for a similar interface as all of the apps on my Android phone. This makes the navigation and choices a little clunky. Lastly, and this goes for nearly every product out there today, it has a proprietary power interface. USB of any sort is as close to a standard as we are seeing. Don't break or lose the charging cable, you will pay $15 to get another one.

One person found this helpful

Karen R.

Could be better

Reviewed in the United States on 2 November 2020

Colour: Grayish BlackVerified Purchase

Okay first of all I like that this has bluetooth. I can easily connect to my Jbl flip 4 (had issues pairing at first) but there doesn't seem to be a setting to turn off volume sync so that I can lower the volume on the speaker and device separately otherwise good feature. The interface is decent. I can scroll easily through my music and it isn't so touch sensitive. I also like that I can create playlists within the device so I don't have to listen to every single track. The audio is average I guess. I don't mess around with the equalizer or any of the other fancy settings. I'm really not that blown away and I wouldn't recommend listening to it at it's highest volume as the sound seems to get worse. 50-70% should be max especially with headphones. Battery life is kinda sucky. I can't get it a day to last let alone two and maybe that's becuase I filled the storage to the max and have extra storage for the thousands of songs I have loaded on it and the fact I use it frequently. I expected at least 20+ hours of playback but I got less. I don't know if anybody has run into this issue but for some reason when I have it on shuffle it will automatically turn off shuffle by itself and it'll start playing the songs in the order I have them which is alphabetically and I'm forced to turn on shuffle again and another issue with playback is that even with repeat off it will occasionally repeat some songs twice. I don't mind that the charger isn't usb-c not a deal breaker for me and besides my laptop doesn't support usb-c anyway. So far this is a decent device but I'm disappointed with the battery life.

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5 star		70%
4 star		17%
3 star		5%
2 star		4%
1 star		3%

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