Here are a couple of (rather blurry) pictures of the Walkman S700 announced by Sony UK yesterday. I managed to borrow this sample for half an hour and have a quick play with it.
You can find larger versions of these photos at http://www.pbase.com/silvabokis/s700_walkman
Here's a very quick summary of my impressions of the player.
- Design - This is a nice unit. It's solid, well built and has just enough weight to feel high quality rather than flimsy. The one I was lent is the same purple as NW-A3000 units and the design definitely makes it feel like part of the same family of products.
- Ease of use - It took less than 5 minutes to unpack the S700, attach it to my laptop and transfer a couple of albums across. At the same time the quick charge got me enough battery life to start listening straight away. The controls don't take very long to get used to and the 'collar control' (can't think of a better way to describe it) makes it easy to navigate through albums and songs.
- Sound - The sound quality is excellent. The S700 has noise cancelling circuitry built in and comes with a high quality set of earbud headphones that have the noise cancelling microphones built into the earpiece. This is a big improvement on previous MP3 Walkmans that have typically needed a headphone upgrade to get the most from them. Holding down the 'Sound' button on the rear of the unit for a couple of seconds switches between EQ modes - personally I prefer to listen to the music with flat EQ but bass-heads will like the second EQ setting that really pumps up the bass level.
- Display - A big difference on this Walkman is the colour OLED display that shows cover art for the songs you're listening to. There's also a clock display and a colour screensaver (multicoloured bubbles that move up the screen).
It's difficult to say any more when I only had the unit for about 30 minutes, but my overall impression is very good. In fact, I might just try and 'borrow' one of these S700s on a longterm basis.
Update - 16th October:
I just did a direct compare of the S700 with my NW-A3000 (with noise restrictions disabled). I used the noise cancelling headphones on the S700 and a pair of Westone UM2 high sensitivity headphones with the NW-A3000.
Bearing in mind the Westone headphones cost about $200 the S700 performs very well in comparison. Bass response is good and percussion sounded very lifelike. The sound is detailed but not as loud as the NW-A3000 + Westones - given the sensitivity of the Westones that's hardly surprising.
As I was testing in a quiet living room it was difficult for me to discern the effect of the noise cancelling features - I'll test again on a plane journey this Wednesday.
The only real test of any MP3 player is whether you enjoy the music. I have had players in the past that I couldn't listen to for long periods because the sound somehow irritated me. This is not the case with the S700 - it's easy to listen to.
2 of the tracks I chose to test with are quite challenging - 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' and 'Orgasmatron' from Albert Kuvezin's Re-Covers album (Check out http://www.yat-kha.com/html/what/yat_kha_cd_recovers.php to download the tracks yourself). The S700 performed very well - the soundstage was very lifelike with individual instruments easy to place in the mix. The only downside was that I had to drive the volume on maximum to get a volume even approaching the NW-A3000/Westone combination.
My final test was to play the S700 through the Westones. The unit automatically detected that the noise cancelling headphones weren't present and I was able to run the volume at 22 to 24 out of 30 to get an excellent soundstage.
Overall conclusion - excellent sound quality but needs more volume. I really need to test in a location with ambient noise to evaluate the noise cancelling feature.
Update - 19th October:
I had a good opportunity to test the Noise Cancelling feature of the S700 yesterday. I listened to various tracks on a flight from London to Brussels.
Initially I thought the feature didn't work - when you navigate through the menu to the Noise Cancelling option it displays the option 'ON' which I assumed was a button to turn the feature on. In fact it was showing me that the feature was already on and so I turned it off by mistake.
Once I had rewired my brain to cope with the strange usability error I found that the noise cancelling worked very well.
By turning down the volume on to 1 or 2 and then switching Noise Cancelling on and off I could hear a huge difference in the characteristic of the background noise. I also found that I could listen comfortably with very little outside disturbance at volume settings of 23 to 25.
It's worth mentioning that Noise Cancelling doesn't remove all ambient noises. Instead it filters out high frequency noise leaving lower frequency noises in place. When you turn on your music the lower frequency noise gets lost in the mix.
One strange feature - if you switch tracks with Noise Cancelling enabled there is a short (<1 second) burst of non-cancelled noise before the Noise Cancelling kicks in again. I guess this is becase the noise cancelling circuitry builds up a buffer of ambient noise before it starts cancelling.
Another interesting feature I tested is the Dynamic Normalizer. This is intended to balance out the volume levels between tracks. In practice it seemed to give a considerable volume boost to most tracks that I played. Maybe I recorded them all too quietly in the first place ;-)
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