Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony NWS706 - 4GB Walkman MP3 Player - With Noise Canceling Headphones - Violet

Just got one of these to supplement my aging iRiver H340.
Much smaller capacity (4G vs. 40G) but so small! Easy to use, really good sound. The noise cancelling phones blotted out my neighbours lawnmower while I listed to Muse!
Sonic Stage is not the most wonderful software I have used, but it works, and to be fair I bought an MP3 player, not a piece of software.
The FM Radio is good to, wasn't expecting great things from this but I was impressed.
Overall this has exceeded my expectations and I am well chuffed!

I-pod etc are by fare poorer than this sony. I found the software easy and painless. If you have a fast USB it wacks hundereds of songs on by the time you've had your tea and washed the car. Only thing that i would add is a clip for the head phone cord and it has a connection that a pull on your ear. I use a tie clip when running.

Truly Outstand, small and amazing sound!

My previous mp3 player was also a sony, 1Gb model. Very happy with it, still works but I wanted something with more capacity.

The best feature of this player from my point of view, and the reason why I stuck with Sony, is its excellent battery life. Personally I wouldn't even consider one of those players with pathetic 14 hour or 8 hour battery life - Unless you remember to recharge it at every opportunity invariably the battery runs out soon after you go out and you end up carrying around a useless bit of plastic all day. The 50 hours that Sony players tend to offer is the bare minimum as far as I'm concerned (and they do seem to live up to the claimed batt life).

The other strong point of this is that it looks pretty nice and solid and is reasonably easy to use. And there aren't currently that many 4G solid state players, though I'm sure that will change rapidly.

The noise cancelling headphones don't really seem necessary to me, other people might get more benefit from them, and anyway I've never kept a pair of headphones for more than a year before losing or breaking them.

One downside is the one everybody notes, that SonicStage is quite a poorly designed piece of software, even now its up to version 4 point something. But at least it no longer tries to limit how many times you can export tracks ripped from your own cds. Though why it has to ask you _every single time_ you put a new cd in whether you want to register with gracenote I don't know. Every single time the same dialog box pops up - I'm not on the internet OK, stop asking that blasted question! Anyway, its just about usable, if irritating. I don't care about compatibility with downloads from itunes or whatever, I buy everything on cd and rip it.

The real downside is one that didn't apply to earlier Sony players, even though they also had 50hr battery life. Sadly they seem to have joined the same 'stupid club' that all other mp3 player manufacturers (ironically apart from the really cheap and nasty ones) belong to.
That is, it now has a stupid built-in rechargeable battery instead of letting you use cheap widely available rechargeable AAAs. This means (a) you can't carry a spare battery or resort to buying a normal AAA from a shop if the one you have goes flat, (b) at some point the charging capacity of the built in one will start to drop noticably, (c) at some later point the built in one will die completely and then you might as well throw the thing away, oh and (d) when the battery goes flat you have to stop using the thing entirely while you recharge it (though its only 2hours to charge, it does expect you to turn your PC on to plug it into).

It also uses a non-standard USB connector, which means if the supplied lead is broken or lost you are stuck. Also it seems a bit cheapskate for a £100 product not to include a neck strap or usb/mains charging adaptor, expecting you to pay extra for them.

The sound quality is very good, though it seems to me a bit more sibilant than my previous Sony.

Oh, and the radio is a very nice addition, though it consumes power at several times the rate as when playing mp3s

The sound quality is excellent. The walkman charges when connected to your PC/laptop via USB connection. The SonicStaging software is very easy to use with tasks such as importing music from your CD, and transferring music to your walkman being very simple - I found it much easier to use than iTunes. A very neat feature is that if your missing information on your music eg artist, genre, year of release, track name etc it pulls the information in for you automatically from a thirdy party service for free.

Some time ago I purchased a 2GB Sony MP3 player from Amazon. I did so with a little trepidation because of the bad publicity attached to SonicStage, but fortunately I wasn't let down. My review of that player appears elsewhere on the Amazon site. More recently I decided I needed a little more capacity in my player, as I am notoriously bad at deciding what to put on it - it's almost guaranteed I will want to listen to something I decided not to download. I was obviously already familiar with the quality of Sony products, and I knew I wasn't one of those unfortunates whose computers would seize up at the mere mention of SonicStage. Sony was therefore the place to start, and I checked out a number of products. Can it really be that people buy things without first carrying out at least basic checks of what the device is capable of ? I have read innumerable complaints from people who have purchased mobile phones and then discovered they have insufficient memory, an inadequate camera, no MP3 capability, etc., etc. How come they didn't know about the shortcomings before they splashed out their hard-earned cash ? However, I digress...As I said, I checked out a number of Sony products and then plumped for the NW-S706. Now I cannot fault my 2GB NW-E005 on any qualitative grounds - I just wanted more space. But the NW-S706 is in the next league up. The noise-reducing headphones really do work, which means you don't need to turn up the volume to hear things. I now listen to music three to five points lower down the volume scale, and hear it just as well as on the 2GB player (if not better). The rubber gromits for the earphones come in three sizes (S, M, L), with the medium ones already fitted when the device arrives. I haven't had to change mine - they fit really snugly in the ear - but I'm sure the others are just as good for those with different aural designs. Just putting the earphones in is like putting in earplugs so that you can go to sleep, and then the active noise reduction has its effect, so ALL you can hear is the music. Bliss ! The controls are easy to use once you are familiar with them (a reading if the manual is advisable). Downloading from SonicStage was as simple as I expected it to be after using it for another device. It's true that SonicStage isn't quite as smooth and option-rich as some other programs, but it works perfectly well. It's also worth remembering that the ATRAC format that Sony uses allows gap-free downloading. Some tracks were intended to naturally flow into each other, but download as MP3 and you hear the gap as the tracks change over. Download as ATRAC and the gap disappears. Try 'Your Time Is Gonna Come' into 'Black Mountain Side' on Led Zeppelin [1], or 'Concerto for a Rainy Day' on 'Out of the Blue' (showing my age now). No contest. The entire device has a reassuring weight to it. Being light is good only up to a point - after that you start to think there is no substance in there and the device will collapse if you sneeze on it. Not with this one. My only hope is that 4GB proves to be enough...