Home > Consumer Reviews > Sony Walkman NWZA-828 8GB Video

I've had my 16GB for a day now and have been fiddling around with its settings and listening to a variety of music. The sound is definitely the best I've heard from an mp3 player, and the superb earphones that come with it definitely play a big part in that. I'd recommend editing the custom EQ to increase the 3rd and 5th bars - this results in a much crisper sound than the default flat setting.

The volume goes about twice the limit of AVLS by the way, so very loud then.

My only real complaint is that there's a pause between each track unless you're playing WAV files (which are far too big). Sony, do us a favour and release a firmware update to rectify that please!

Solid quality, brilliant ergonomics, easy to navigate menu, drag and drop,never-ending battery lifes, typically Sony! What more can you ask for? Ditch Ipods!

I bought a Sony NWZA818 model last year and it was my favourite player so far. After testing the latest NWZA829 model in Sony's showroom in Tokyo I decided to buy one.

This is simply a nice improvement from the NWZA800 series. The menu is almost the same and retains all previous options although they are not all where they used to be.

The sound quality is awsome, the screen is big and the picture is crisp and clear. The bluetooth tool is a nice add on if you have bluetooth speakers.

You can also record any audio source directly.

Sonic Stage is maybe not the best music management software but i'm used to it so I didn't need to change any settings. Simply plugged my new player and transfer all my tracks as usual. Did the same for my vids and photos.

The only downside I noticed today, if you play on shuffle mode it shuffles the all list of tracks and not just the album or playlist you selected...maybe I need to read the instruction manual.

I really should start by saying that I only received this yesterday so haven't had a massive amount of testing / playing around with it yet, but the main thing of note here is the sound - it's truly outstanding. It sounds better than anything I have previously heard from and kind of sound source. The unit is very light and the video samples that are included really show what it's capable of. The video's are fluid and I cannot believe how good they look on something so compact. The in-ear phones that are bundled are a bit strange but they are brilliant. I won't be upgrading them anyway.

A couple of things I don't like though is that it doesn't appear to have a sleep timer. I have one of those sound asleep pillows and really need a sleep timer to take advantage of it. And my 2nd gripe is that it uses tags like iTunes does. I put over 2000 songs on there last night and found that they were named oddly and in no sort of order. I used a tagging program though last night and it managed to auto tag about 40% of them, but I still have a lot of work to do to get the rest properly tagged.

All in all this is a fantastic unit and well worth the money considering I paid the same 18 months ago for an iPod Nano 4Gb. Forget iPod, Sony produce a FAR better sound. It is an absolute joy listening to music again - all these songs have been given a new lease of life!

I had a chance to listen to quite a few MP3 players starting with the original Diamond Rio.
I have owned Creative Vision:M, Sony A818 and quite a few others. The new Sony is an upgrade to my current Creative HDD player. The included EX-082 earphones are very-very good and most people will be happy with those. However my primary IEMs are Ultimate Ears Super.fi5 Pro which work very nicely with Sony.

I very strongly recommend this small toy. If you can look pass the crazyness surrounding the Apple's products you will be rewarded with superb sound, design and no restrictions!

I also recommend MediaMonkey as a media manager for this player. It's free and way better than itunes (check out cnet reviews).