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 11 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.

10 people found this helpful

PiggieNotes

Outdated for 2021.

Reviewed in Canada on 22 April 2021

Verified Purchase

Cons:
- Biggest Con for me: NO WAY it lasts for 45 hours. I worry if it lasts for 15 hours. Did I get a bad one?
- I am OK to wait for a sec or two to have the device on. However, if you leave this product for a day, it will shut down completely so I have to wait for quite a long time for it to restart. It is ridiculous when you consider smartphones will turn on right away.
- Touch screen response is noticeably slow, but forgivable.
- Music Centre is not that user-friendly and not so practical. I have to delete all music from my device and re-upload music in order to avoid duplicating.
- Editing and sorting takes time.... and I do not think there is a way to transport the format to the other computer. Therefore, I have to organize all over again when I replace my computer.
- No nice accessories from both Canada and Japan Amazon.

4 people found this helpful

Anon E. Moose

Great sound, but finicky to use at times.

Reviewed in Canada on 28 January 2022

Verified Purchase

Day one and already needing to send it back. It is locked in a forever "creating database" loop which with my 512GB of 24-bit FLAC files takes nearly 30 minutes every startup. The player will not read SD cards from other players, be prepared to format and setup fresh. Support is non existant, hold the power button for 10 seconds to reboot, I just saved everyone a call to support as it's all Sony offers.
The device probably sounds good as it's a Sony and battery life is probably good too, but I'll never know. Also proprietary expensive cable for this unit. If you had cables for previously owned players than too bad, go buy some expensive Sony charge cables.
*Edit:
I fixed the SD card issue, make a directory called "MUSIC" on the root of your external SD and move all the music in there. The player seems to treat /music as the root.
Day 3 Edit:
So I'm pretty sure the Creating Database problem was a result of my music being in the wrong place on the SD, it still takes a good 5 minutes for it to rebuild everytime you take out or put in the MicroSD though.
With access to music now, I am keeping this unit, upgraded the rating by 2 stars because the sound quality on this thing is mind blowing. I find it produces a very warm rich sound and it has great software options to change that sound to taste.
Battery life on this thing is also no joke. Battery will much depend on the quality and bit rate of whatever is being played, and what optional filters or EQ settings being used. I use mine heavily and need to charge it every other day or so.
The touch screen and operating system are both very responsive and easy to use, users are free to navigate their collections by tags or by the file structure on the SD itself. The mechanical buttons on the side provide access to key playback features at all times so you don't need to access the touch screen to pause, or volume change. Also a back and forward buttons for easy track switching.
Volume control goes from 0 to 120, very easy to make subtle changes to volume.

Richard

Un son excellent mais un software penible

Reviewed in Canada on 10 September 2020

Verified 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

2 people found this helpful

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popeyeiseye

Sloppy packaging

Reviewed in Canada on 20 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

Michel Bédard

Durée de vie de la batterie

Reviewed in Canada on 10 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

One person found this helpful

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Paul Boswell

Sounds Better Than a Smartphone But Sloppy Engineering & Software

Reviewed in the United States on 1 October 2021

Verified Purchase

Sony continues it's legendary Walkman portable music player legacy with a series of Hi-Definition music players like the NW-A55/L. It's well built and feels good in your hand. The screen is color and displays album artwork on file formats that support that feature, but be aware that most high definition formats don't -- and that's the main attraction of this device, in my view. The accompanying PC software is useless, but fortunately loading the device is a simple drag-and-drop affair from your desktop PC. The Walkman plugs into USB and appears like any other hard drive. If you use an external microSD card, it appears as another drive. The beauty of this device is its simplicity. It's easy to get files off and on, and it only does one thing -- play music. This particular "L" extension model has a separate folder for language study which has some additional features like slowing down or speeding up tracks. This might also be useful for audio book listening. To use the FM radio feature you'll have to plug in wired headphones, which serve as the antenna. Consequently you can't listen to FM over bluetooth. So far, so good. Now the bad news. The user interface is functional but poorly laid out. The font is thin and hard to read. The controls are too close together. The Bluetooth implementation is the worst I've ever seen in a modern electronic device. It's just doesn't pair on about half of the devices I own, so expect to use wired devices. Sony's support for Walkman players seems to be focused in Japan with the rest of the world as an afterthought. Aside from the grey 16GB model and maybe the Moonlight blue version, you're out of luck to find the better models in the US. The accessories like the strap and case will have to be ordered on eBay from Japan. The recommended headphones (IER-NW500N/NE and MDR-NW750/NE) are also no where to be found in the U.S. Now, you may ask why I'm using a stand-alone MP3 player instead of my iPhone 12? Yes, I do have Apple Music but it has a lot of problems. Downloaded song files constantly disappear for no reason -- forcing me to stream them over costly cellular when I'm away from home. Many of the new "lossless" tracks simply won't play at all. Apple Music also requires me to upload my owned music to their service, which is a serious privacy issue and, again, many tracks refuse to upload. So I'm going back to a stand-alone MP3 player. I have two sets of Airpod Pros, one paired after a few attempts, the other refuses to pair. In fairness to Sony, I should point out that the Apple music player app on the iPhone is even worse than the Walkman interface. Sony's 100-Series Walkmans use Android as their operating system. This allows you to stream from services like Apple Music or Spotify, but that brings the same privacy problems that smartphones present -- you shouldn't have to give out your date of birth and other sensitive information to use a music player. Fortunately, the NW-A55/L only asks for the date and time. This player also uses a proprietary Sony cable to connect it to USB Power for charging, so it you lose it, you're out of luck. No power brick or headphones come with the device. The FM radio works well, but oddly you only get 5 presets. Why? It's not like presets require massive storage space. The 16GB internal drive (which leaves about 12GB for music) is ridiculous for a player that costs nearly $200 -- and one that is sold on its ability to play HD tracks, which eat up about 50MB for a 3 minute track. Clearly this was designed by a committee who couldn't get their head around the whole product. It would be like designing an expensive sports car and, upon forgetting to include brakes, throwing in a parachute at the end of the assembly line to cover up their mistake. Maybe Sony won't ever dominate the stand-alone MP3 player market as it once did with the audio cassette and CD Walkman models, but I think there is a growing interest in stand-alone devices for greater privacy, ease of use and better sound than we can get from Smartphones. P.S. There's a real headphone jack on this device!

2 people found this helpful

Gary C. Woodward

A wonderful player saddled with terrible software

Reviewed in the United States on 28 October 2020

Verified 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.

4 people found this helpful

E. Rothrock

A review for former iPod users.

Reviewed in the United States on 7 March 2022

Verified Purchase

As a satisfied owner and regular user of an iPod Classic for the better part of 20 years, I was quite perturbed when Apple decided to ghost its own product. Not a fan of streaming services, I looked for a replacement mp3 player and was shocked to discover that the Sony Walkman was not only alive and kicking but also at or near the top of recommendation lists. The NW-A55 seemed like it checked most of the boxes, so I bought one. I can tell you after using it for a couple weeks now, this is no iPod Classic. The UI (user interface) is simple enough, but it looks like a monitor screen from a 1980's computer terminal. The touch screen is nice, but I actually miss the scroll dial on the iPod Classic - it was much easier to adjust the volume, for example. A prior reviewer posted that the NW-A55 works perfectly with Media Monkey; he lied. None of my playlists were copied, so now I have to manually re-create them in the Walkman. The NW-A55 also doesn't copy podcasts as intuitively as the iPod did: instead of having a "Podcast" folder on the main page, I have to go into the "Genre" option first and then scroll down to the "Podcast" folder. (Or I can go into the "Album" folder on the main screen and then scroll down to find each one individually, which is an even less useful method.) The worst problem with the podcasts, though, is that the player doesn't remember where I left off listening and won't pick up from that same point when I come back to it. So, if I'm listening to a 2-hour podcast and decide to stop at, say, the 1 hour 3 minute mark to listen to some music for a while, I have to remember the exact point at which I stopped because the podcast will re-start from the beginning when I come back to it. Insanely frustrating. Also, the battery life is a joke. (Granted, I received a used one, so that might have something to do with it.) I like the expandable memory with the micro-SD card, the Bluetooth capability is nice, and definitely no complaint about the sound quality. Others reviewers can comment about the tech side of the thing, with the digital upscaling and various hi-res audio components, but all-in-all the NW-A55 pales by far in comparison to my iPod Classic.

One person found this helpful

Don B. Walker

Sony Can Do Better, Surely!

Reviewed in the United States on 3 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.

One person found this helpful

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5 star		69%
4 star		16%
3 star		6%
2 star		4%
1 star		6%

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Sony NW-A55/B Walkman NW-A55 Hi-Res 16GB MP3 Player, Grayish Black

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