Sony NW-A808 review

Photos look amazing. Once you've dragged and dropped image files on to the device, you can create cool-looking slide shows with some nifty transitions between your different shots. If you divide your photos up into folders on your PC, they appear on the NW-A808 as galleries, with handy thumbnails easily showing the contents.

The music playback screen is informative and tidy. Album art is generally displayed in a small square at the top left of the screen, although you can choose to have floating album art which fills about 80 per cent of the screen during playback. Artist, album, song title and year of release are all displayed in the lower half of the screen, along with a progress bar.

The built-in search feature is incredibly useful for finding artists or songs in a large library. The whole alphabet is displayed on-screen, with unused letters greyed out. To jump to all artists beginning with the letter 'S', for example, just click 'S' and you're immediately taken to the appropriate section of your library.

Playlists generally work as you'd expect, but there's also a dynamic playlist option that lists the 100 most listened-to tracks. You can also have up to five on-the-fly playlists and tracks can be removed just as easily as they can be added, by clicking the 'add to trash' option.

Other useful features include the ability to create on-the-fly music playlists, fully searchable music libraries via an alphabetical search filter, various modes of shuffle playback and a dedicated 'options' button for bringing up in-line context menus.

Performance
Audio playback is stunning and, miracle of miracles, the bundled headphones are excellent. All ranges in the audible spectrum are reproduced well, but especially bass. We were particularly impressed when listening to Slam by Pendulum -- a bass-driven dance track that pounded clearly through even the stock headphones. Mid-ranges and highs performed equally well.

Audiophiles will still probably want to invest in a superior pair of 'phones, but the supplied set will perform well for the majority of people. We've been waiting for this day to arrive for a long time!

For once, the bundled headphones are superb

Sony's Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE) is supposed to make the compressed audio sound better, but we didn't notice any significant improvement.

But turning on the ClearStereo and ClearBass options did make a dramatic different to sound quality. ClearBass on its highest setting makes bass frequencies feel twice as loud without affecting mid ranges and highs at all.

Being a Sony player, the NW-A808 supports Sony's own ATRAC format. This may leave you reliant on SonicStage, however, as the format is sparsely supported in other PC media players. Other audio formats include MP3, unprotected WMA and AAC. This means you'll be able to play downloaded files you've bought from Sony's own Connect online store, but not those from services such as Napster or iTunes.