I used to have these big mp3 players with big hard drives. I shot out a lot of these players with my expensive Ultimate Ears Super.fi 5 pro Headphones. In the end, I bought the Sony Walkman pictured above. It came with decent headphones that by themselves would cost you 80 bucks. I don’t use them thanks to my Ultimate ears but, If I could not afford expensive ear buds, the ones that come with this walkman sure are great for pack in headphones. I hate the ipods. They sound like shit. Crappy DACs. I hate that you cannot view the file system, like by directory and folder etc. That is why I never recommend any ipod to anyone. This walkman doesn’t have the ipod limitations. Not to mention I don’t really like itunes, bad sound quality on most of the music, and DRM. (I’m all about amazon.com mp3, they are all 256, drm free and cheaper usually). Sony got rid of all the DRM in their newer mp3 players. I can plug this into any pc, mac, and i think Linux as well. It shows up as a drive. You charge it up via usb only though. I prefer to view the file tree by folder and files and not by id tags. It can do id tags as well though. It shows LP art as well. No it doesn’t have cover flow but who cares, that gets old in 3 seconds. The competition just doesn’t even come close.

The converters on this walkman are great. I think it sounds amazing. More real and flat. Not hyped. There are fx and eqs that help a lot, and you can do a custom eq as well. The limiter is nice and can help when you listen to old music that is not mastered as hot and loud as todays music. I thought this unit sounded the best. I think the Iaudio and Iriver give it a run for its money on the DAC quality. But not with the pack in headphones, or video playback and size. This thing is tiny, but it does have a decent display for being so small. You can watch videos on this. I use ffmpegx to convert to mp4 low res. This is great to take with you. A couple of videos. or Anime can really make time pass when waiting on car repairs or anything like that. This thing has saved my life from pure boredom when I am out and about waiting. I only need about 8gb. That works for me. Transfering to this device is a little slower than my old iriver 320. But once it’s on there, it’s great. I used to work out at the gym a lot, and I would get long pauses on my hd mp3 players if I was running hard when it would try and switch songs. Not the case on the walkman. It plays perfect with out hickups no matter how much I jump around.

The thing that really pushed this unit over the top for me was the size. I hated carrying around this huge brick of an mp3 player when i would go to the gym. I needed something smaller. I looked at the Ipod nano before i looked at this. And man the converters on that thing sound like ass. I hate the nav wheel on the apple crap as well. The Sony walkman navs great, with a directional button, a center click, and two other buttons on the front. Volume control on the side! This is a big plus compared to the Ipod as well. For the price and the money, you get the best pack in headphones. The best audio quality. The best screen and video playback. DRM free, and copy files from any os, it shows up as a hard drive, you can open it up and copy to it drag and drop. (you are not forced to use windows media player or itunes, which I hate) Seriously, amazon is selling them for 199 dollars for the 8 gig. They come in 3 colors, silver, white, and black. They all look cool. Seriously, this is about the size of a credit card, a little smaller actually. The battery life is about 33 hours of mp3 playback on about half of the total volume setting. I get about 24 when i blast it. Watching movies on it cuts the battery life by more than in half. I love the sleek stylish design of the unit. Only draw back is the short cable on the head phones. Other than that one small thing, I love it. I give this a 5 out of 5. Click here to buy the Sony Walkman 8 gb version for 199 dollars.