Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony Walkman NWZA-826 4GB Video

Although the A829 has dropped some of the useful features found on the A800 series (on-the fly playlists, ratings, drect deletion from the unit, playback history, gapless...!) the 5 stars is awarded purely on sound quality. It is superb with a capital 'S'!

The previous series sounded excellent. I have the A808 and I didn't imagine the sound quality would be any different on the newer models, but it is. There's an increased soundstage which is very noticeable when going back and forth between the two units. It also has a slightly more neutral and less 'bright' sound (while still keeping the same famous Sony 'punch'.)

It's so good that I'm selling my Zune 80 which I loved for the expansive soundstage, but the A829 competes with it very closely.

For those of you with the 800/810 series, the menus are almost identical, which makes the transition to the 829 very easy. It comes with the same EX082 earphones as the previous series, which are nothing short of amazing for bundled phones. They don't isolate much, due to the design - they sit slightly outside the ear canal - but they sound very good in quietish environments.

The 829 is still tiny, hardly bigger than the 808, but the increase in screen size makes all the difference. The display is much brighter and clearer than the 808 and soooooo pretty! I had both units turned to maximum brightness to compare them - and the 829 is a LOT brighter at the highest setting.

I also discovered that it is fully functional with the CPF-NW001 speaker cradle for the 700/800 series, which is great, since I have two of them.

One minor annoyance is that the Bluetooth switch is located directly beneath the volume rocker, so it's easy to press that by mistake!

Syncing with WMP is easy peasy. Just select the 'sync' tab at the top of WMP, and then drag everything you want from the library straight across to the sync pane. If you have any issues with album art, try using mp3 tag to edit the files. It worked really well for me.

Although gapless is not advertised - it does in fact play gapless WAV files which was a huge surprise since I didn't know this beforehand. True, with only 16GB to spare, you won't want to put too many on there, but I just chose a few favourites and I'm more than happy with it.

If you're looking for something that has fantastic sound quality, and looks really cute at the same time - then look no further. You really won't be disappointed.

I got this player to replace my creative Zen 16gb player..which although was very nice..was very unreliable and was constantly freezing and messing up. although i got a replacement for the first one the second still had these faults so i decided to go back to Sony after havin previously owned (before the Zen) a very trusty sony NW-A1000 that lasted me 3 years.
I can say im very happy with my new sony walkman! the sound quality is amaaazing- it has many different sound experiences for u to fiddle with such as 'Matrix','Live' and 'Studio'. The walkman itself is lovely to hold, has nice quiet buttons (that dont click rly loudly when u press them-which i find very irritating having experienced with the zen) and the screen has a very lovely display.
Some things im disappoined with are firstly that u can create playlists on the player - this has to be done on the computer. Another is that songs cannot be deleted from the player or put in a 'trash bin' to be deleted when connected to a computer.

Great Player altogether tho! But for those a little confused..the 16GB doesnt come with bluetooth headphones..just the EX earphones. disappointing yes..but its still a good player!

OK, it's not an ipod, so you can't touch the screen to scroll through the music collection.
But the fact it's not an ipod is a good thing! Because the music quality (admittedly using Shure earphones) is awesome.
It's an easy to use player, but also has lots of options if you want to tweak the sound quality or effects.
The big advantage over previous Sony mp3 players is no need to use any Sony software - simply click and drag using windows explorer - and will recognise folders up to 8 deep. (If someone can think of a time when you'd use that many folders please let me know!)

Received it on Wednesday evening and had 6GB of music ready to go for the next morning within an hour.

Haven't tried bluetooth headphones yet, but will update the review when I do.

Got the Sony NWZ-A829 a couple of days ago as a present. Up to now I've just had a cheap 2 GB MP3 player. I wanted a player with a large memory capacity but didn't want an iPod as I wanted something a little different to everyone else.

Looked at this machine and a Creative one but opted for this based on the general reviews of the Sony MP3 players as overall most people are impressed with the Sony compared with Creative.

The machine loos very stylish, very sleek, less than a centimeter wide. It looks a little like a phone and is in shiny black.

As an extra I bought the silicone case which came with a free screen protector as I was worried that it'd get scratched. I'd pleased that I did. Although given the price of it, it would have been nice if Sony had included one as part of the package.

The screen is large and bright. The menu screen straight forward and easy to navigate.

I didn't use the Sony software that came with the machine to load the music, I either used Windows Media player 11 or simply cut and paste from my hard drive to the player via the computer. This was easier enough to do.

I'd read some reviews regarding Sony dropping some features from previous models, on-the fly playlists, ratings, ability to delete from the player and I have to agree that this is very annoying. You can only do create playlists and delete tracks via the computer; this is not what MP3 players are about. I want to be able to sit on the bus and create a new playlist for the day and not have to hook it up to a computer to do it! Also the charge is a UBS one, so again I have to hook it up to a computer to charge it (unless I have missed something?)

One cool feature is the time machine shuffle which picks a year and plays tracks from that year. The clock screen saver looks stylish too.

However, these features aside, the REAL reason I purchased this over others on the market was that Sony have an excellent reputation in relation to sound quality. I have to say I am not disappointed in this department. The sound is bright and crisp and I can hear sounds and instruments on some tracks than I never could on my other players or my stereo at home. You can adjust the sound with the equalizer which has heavy, pop jazz, unique or you can customise to your requirements. Also there is the VPT (surround) with studio, live, club, arena matrix? and karaoke options. These change the sound quality also which is pretty good too.

The headphones look a little odd, normal in ear headphone with additional attachments which slot into your inner ear. Hard to explain, looks odd but work very well.

I haven't used the video options yet as I have bought it for music.

This model comes with bluetooth although the 16gb doesn't come with the bluetooth headphones as standard which the 4 and 8gb do, again not sure why this is, given the top of the range model.

I did look a US version which is the same as this save that it comes without bluetooth as I'm not too fussed about this feature but it worked out the same price so got the 829. I may invest in bluetooth headphones in the future although for now the ones that came with the package are very good.

Overall very pleased with the 829, the sound quality is excellent hence the 4 star rating but would have liked to have seen some of the features from the previous models for it to have 5 stars.

Just upgraded to this little beauty after my Creative MuVo2 started getting a little unreliable after about 4 years use. The capacity at 16Gb is fine and the sound is better than my previous machine. Good interface to select what you want to listen to. It's Bluetooth enabled so I can actually play it through my Hi-Fi with the addition of a Bluetooth receiver. My one beef is that in common with many players it does not cope well with storing classical music in any logical way. The NWZ-A829 uses Windows Media Manager underneath its own Sony media manager and unfortunately the ripping software with WMM is poor at identifying tracks on classical music CDs. I think this is partially due to the record companies being less than consistent about what and how they enter music data in the file details. Result being that using Windows Explorer is the only sure way of transferring tracks to the player, plus you have to rewrite information wrongly entered by WMM and or the record company. The downside of this is that so far I have not found a reliable way of loading Playlists because this requires WMM and using that to load tracks causes all sorts of problems, with bizarre entries under albums, artists and folders. Playlists are probably less important with much classical music anyway, as the pieces are often quite long. But that minor whinge apart and to be fair I don't think it is entirely Sony's fault, its a great player and if you use it for jazz or popular music format it will be fine. The sound is five star with good In-ear phones with rubber adaptors for different sized lugholes. The connector is a straight plug. I would have preferred a right angle plug as the cord for the phones is a bit thin and prone to getting kinked.I am already having trouble with that and am in the process of purchasing something a little more robust. I should add that I use my Sony on the allotment so it comes in for a bit of abuse at times. The player survives it all with the addition of a third party protective cover.