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

You have to put the headphones right into your ear to get the base which is fine and comfortable but, when I ran, my footsteps vibrated right through, from my skull, through the earpieces, into my head - came across as a really deep heavy bass sound - couldn't hear the music ! And when my heart started pumping that too came right through :-( I'll have to stick with more out-of-ear. But, if you don't do running then the sound proofing is great !

I gave this a three because of two other reasons:

1) The poor interface on the stick itself. I like to search through my music by artist - this things default is by track or album name. To search by artist you have to go through a menu system which is no good when I'm running along. The speed of the interface was also not quick - because they've put a fancy graphic over the scrolling mechanism it takes too long to scroll from one artist to he next. Oh and the volume control is a little fiddly too.

2) I hated the sonic stage software. You HAVE to use it to put music on the thing. Again, seems to deal in tracks by default which is crazy when I wanted to create a playlist with hundreds of tracks on it. Maybe it was me but I couldn't find a way to view a playlist by artist. Overall, the software was not intuitive.

Hi you're reading this because you're probaby considering buying a small mp3 player with no moving parts capable of operating with no problems during movement, has a great battery life and a quality of sound with a real high fidelity... In this respect the NWS706 delivers, big time. It looks the nuts and you'll often get chicks come over asking you to spark their cigarette, mistaking it for a lighter a great ice breaker!

BUT THATS ABOUT AS FAR AS MY PRAISE FOR THIS LITTLE HEADACHE GOES. Right the deal is this. U got 4GB of space to slap all your Psytrance and Tech House/ Techno into, 4GB is a good few tunes at 192khz so u need a decent interface to browse and select your music. Sonic Stage (Sony's obligatory software) is about as useful as Microsoft Paint and about as ugly as Peter Beardsley so all in all utter sh**e. Ive had my NWS706 for a few months now and i STILL dont get it, playlists are a nightmare and more often than not you'll make a mistake with the order of your tracks and instead of being able to reshuffle them like you'd expect via the software you cannot- delete, recompile and transfer is your only option.

The interface is hopeless on the device itself aswell. If only you could change the the genre, order or rating of a specific track without the need to be in front of the painstaking SonicStage i would have a smile on my face. Fast Forward and Rewind functions have been inspired by Forrest Gump, taking forever to reach the middle of a 7 minute tune, NOTHING LIKE iPods search wheel. SO if your expecting something as intuitive as that dont buy this player.

Skipping through tracks in reverse is almost impossible too, for some reason you cannot just hold the lever in the reverse position to keep skipping through tracks u have to manually skip each one, believe me, this will seriously make u consider catapulting the little f***er back into the Sony offices.

There are other annoyances but im too vexed to keep writing in this little box; due to my laziness i never bothered to send it back and get a refund. In short, if you dont care about being able to find your music, need something small for the gym and have alot of time on your hands to work out SonicStage this is for you. If like myself you have hundreds of tracks and often swap your music over, need to listen to your own mixes, enjoy the flexibility of customising playlists and the luxury of being to actually find what you want when you want it without crashing yur car or pulling your hair out- THEN STEER CLEAR.

I spent quite a long time trying to decide whether to get an ipod nano like the one I bought my wife for Christmas or go for something a little different. I was impressed enough by the reviews on here to go for the Sony 4gb MP3 player. The fact that the sound quality was raved about and that there is a radio on board made me decide on this one.

First Impressions are fairly good and getting better as tims goes. I have had it out of the box for two hours and have installed the software and downloaded 170 tracks. Quite happy with the software although perhaps it is not quite upto iTunes but to be honest it is not a million miles away and the functionality is obviously fine.

Sound quality. Now this is where I am not quite so convinced. It is good but I have a Sony Ericcson phone with onboard walkman and I think it is much the same as that.....so far but there are Equaliser settings which do work. Don't get me wrong the sound is rich and powerful but maybe not quite what I was expecting.

Radio is a big disapointment. I was hoping (perhaps a bit too optimistically) that the radio hardware/software would be the same as the 810i phone as that has excellent features such as muting out the static, Radio id etc but this has none of that which is a great disapointment to me. I am half wishing I had just bought a bigger card for my phone but the battery life was an issue to me.

Functionality. Nowhere near as good as ipod. Not a major surprise as it is so small but still it is just not as intuitive but I guess I shall get used to it.

Noise cancellation feature is more a muting thing in case anyone is expecting to completley shut out all noise. I am expecting it to be quite valuable on buses, panes etc although a decent set of headphones shall do that anyway.

In summary, big on features but not quite living up to the promises and hype. I will still give it 4 stars however as it is an impressive piece of kit and it is only 2 hours since I opened it and I think I will love it once I find out ow much the battery lasts! :)


I have now owned this for several months and I do still like it although I think the ipod is still a better piece of kit. The most annoying thing for me is the software does not support pod casting software. I have managed to get around it by using itunes and then importing the files into my player....not optimal but it works.

A nice device, but beware when the Lithium Ion battery reaches its end of life. It is not user replaceable, and Sony quote approximately £80 for a service replacement. Two star rating because of the battery issue.