Sony NW-HD1 20 GB Network Walkman Digital Music Player

by Sony

Product Details

Supplementary Guide [759kb PDF]

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Product Manual [1.06mb PDF]

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Data Sheet [152kb PDF]

• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0002T3UPG
• Item model number: NWHD1
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Sony enters the crowded hard disk-based music player scene with a formidable contender, the NW-HD1. Billed as the world's smallest hard drive digital music player, the silver palm-sized unit is slim and sleek-- perfect for a pocket or purse. Weighing just under 3.9 ounces, the NW-HD1 is so light, you'll want to take it everywhere. Inside the unit, a 20 GB drive stores up to 13,000 Songs in ATRAC3plus format when the songs are encoded at the 48kbps bitrate setting. A lithium-ion battery delivers up to a whopping 30 hours of playtime-- most other digital music devices can't even come close in the battery life department.

The NW-HD1 keeps the music smooth and steady with a built in G-Sensor that ensures skip-free play during your bounciest car rides, workouts and jogging expeditions. The 1.5" 7-line backlit display provides all the information you need to keep tabs on your tunes. While displaying track number, bit rate, elapsed time, song title, and artist name, it provides a spectrum analyzer for viewing your music's highs and lows, as well as play mode, bass boost, volume limiter and battery life indicators.

In addition to a standard mini headphone jack, the NW-HD1 also sports a line out jack so you can plug the player into your car or home stereo, or into a powered speaker system. The unit's USB 2.0 port is the key transferring music onto the device and charging the battery. Simply pop the NW-HD1 into the supplied cradle, connect the cradle to your PC and you're ready to transfer your ATRAC3plus encoded tracks at high speed to the device. Meanwhile, the cradle charges the NW-HD1's battery when the cradle is plugged in via the supplied AC adapter. A quick charge feature allows the battery to be charged to 80 percent capacity in just an hour.

The power to encode, organize, and manage the music you play on the NW-HD1 lies in Sony's bundled music software, SonicStage. With SonicStage, you can import, manage and easily transfer your digital music collections. First, import your audio CDs, existing MP3s or Windows Media files into SonicStage and then encode them to ATRAC3plus. Then, set up playlists and mixes on your PC. Finally, use the high speed USB connection to upload the tracks to your NW-HD1. It couldn't be simpler. The NW-HD1 is also fully compatible with Sony's robust Connect Online Music Store, which provides an easy method for downloading personal music in ATRAC3plus format. Connect offers access to over 500,000 songs including many independent titles as well as featured artist and celebrity mixes.

What's in the Box
HW-HD1 Network Walkman Digital Music Player, SonicStage software, earbud headphones, carrying pouch, USB cable, USB cradle, AC power adaptor

Product Description

Sony NW-HD1 Portable Hard Disk Audio Player Network WALKMAN - Supplied Accessories: SonicStage Software, Headphones, Carrying Pouch, USB Cable, USB Cradle, AC Power Adaptor Hi-speed USB compatible. Fast transfer of track data Includes USB cradle VPT Acoustic Engine. 6 band sound equalizer Mode button and search key for fast and easy search of desired tracks Magnesium alloy content body Dual-use as a PC external storage device for virtually any data file, including MP3 - WMA - JPEG No skipping. A data memory of up to 25 minutes to deliver skip-free performance in most conditions 1.5 7-Line Backlit LCD Display Sony's Connect Online Music Service provides an easy method for downloading legal music with access to over 500,000 songs including independent & featured artists as well as celebrity mixes Internal Rechargeable Battery Provides Up to 30 Hours continuous play (ATRAC3 Audio Playback) / Quick charge feature allows battery to be charged to 80% capacity in one hour Connects to USB 2.0 Port for High-Speed Data Transfer Unit Dimensions (WHD) - 3 5/ 8 x 2 1/ 2 x 9/ 16 / Weight - 3.8 oz Color - Silver

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Work of Art Ruined By The Worst Software Ever Written, November 21, 2004

By 

chris2519 "Chris" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Sony NW-HD1 20 GB Network Walkman Digital Music Player (Electronics)

From a hardware perspective, it's a work of art. Beautiful, sleek, lightweight, and solid feeling. I got it in my hands and fell in love. And then I tried to use it. Which required installing SonicStage. I'd read all the bad reviews of SonicStage, and I'd used (what I thought was) equally bad Sony software in the past -- OpenMG for their NetMD player, for example. So I was prepared for some annoyances, fine tuning, maybe occassional bugs. I also assumed the people who complained were exaggerating about how bad it was. LET ME PROMISE YOU -- THEY WERE NOT. In almost twenty years of using computer software, tinkering with electronics, owning some version of almost every gadget known to man -- I have never seen such a promising piece of hardware CRIPPLED by such a buggy, ill-conceived, underpowered, unintuitive piece of software. It's WORSE than what people are telling you. It's so bad that I ended up returning mine and buying an Ipod -- something I swore I'd never do. The user interface isn't even consistent between the player and the software. There's no way to shuffle all the songs on the drive. User support is non-existent. SonicStage freezes and crashes for no reason, despite being upgraded to latest version and uninstalled/reinstalled. Certain songs won't transfer, others are marked as having no digital rights (even though they were tracks recorded from the same albums as other songs that transferred fine -- and that NEVER had digital rights assigned to them in the first place.) A lot of people have complained about Sony forcing you to use their proprietary ATRAC3 format instead of MP3. Honestly -- that's the LEAST of this unit's problems. The bigger problem is that the software engineers are too incompetent to program a stable program that will actually CONVERT and MANAGE those ATRAC3's. Sony's hardware engineers created this beautiful player, and their software engineers will be the cause of its failure. Words cannot do justice to how badly Sony bungled this mess. It kills me to say this, but don't waste your time.
**NEW ADDITION: To the reviewers who make comments to the effect that anyone who has problems with SonicStage software either has a faulty computer or is a complete idiot: Have you actually tried to USE the software? Or do you just sort of sit and stare at the pretty pictures on the screen? (I mean, come on. Nobody's arguing that the hardware is extremely impressive, but the software is buggy, unintuitive, and inconsistent. It's been pretty well documented by several thousand people. I can't imagine that anyone outside of the programming group that put that mess together would actually think it's a competent piece of software, and if they do, they must enjoy spending hours in front of their computer and not have much of a social life.) Second, some reviewers have disputed my claim that the unit cannot shuffle the entire HD. My claim is true, it has been substantiated by a senior marketing representative from Sony with whom I have exchanged several letters and phone calls. Yes, you can shuffle within albums (or "groups"), and you can shuffle within artists and playlists. But you CANNOT shuffle through the entire HD as a whole. The only way this would be possible would be to designate the entire library as a single playlist, and playlists are currently limited to 1000 tracks. So if you have 3,000 tracks on the player, there is absolutely, positively no way to shuffle those 3,000 tracks -- only subsets of those tracks (e.g., album, group, etc.) I suppose you could spend several extra hours of your life creating complicated playlists and shuffle between those playlists. But on an Ipod (and, incidentally, almost every other MP3 player on the market), you simply hit a menu entry titled "shuffle."

53 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An extremely well built MP3 player, August 28, 2004

By 

Alexander Kalininskiy (New York City) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sony NW-HD1 20 GB Network Walkman Digital Music Player (Electronics)

I will keep this very simple and list the pro's and the con's of this unit so you can see what I liked about it and what I did not. For reference, my last MP3 player was a Jukebox Zen 20gig USB 2.0 version but the hard drive died so I purchased this sony.

Let me get the bad out of the way first:
-No remote included in the box (for 400, there really should be one)
-Converstion of MP3s to Atrac takes a long time if you have more than 1 gig of music...but...(see the good below)
-No "on the go" playlists. That is my biggest gripe with the unit as far as operations and functions go. There is a bookmark feature that lets you remember up to 100 of your favorite songs so you can make a bogus playlist of sorts, but coming from a Zen, the playlist feature is dearly missed
-The case included cannot be hanged anywhere. It simply protects the player from scratches but has no belt clip/string/rope.
-Cheapo headphones in the box but that's expected.


Now the good...
-Visually, this unit is simply stunning. Pictures do not do it justice. It actually looks like a 400 dollar piece of technology.
-While Atrac conversion is slow, it could not be more simple. A transfer wizard asks you to select the songs you want to move to the player, and then converts them ON THE FLY without making a copy of the file in Atrac on your computer. It's great because if you have a lot of music, you can simply leave the player on overnight and everything will be done when you get up.
-The player sounds very good. I can say that I found the quality to be much better than my Zen, and the Zens are known for their awesome sound quality.
-64 kbps Atrac compression sounds pretty much as good as a 128 kbps MP3 compression.
-Menus are very simple to navigate and there are only 2 buttons on this unit not counting the standard >>, <<,play/stop buttons. All of them are used to good effect.
-The equalizer on this thing is stunning. On my Zen, I always turned it off because I could not hear a difference. Here, the unit actually sounds better depending on what settings you like.
-Battery life is stellar. Not exactly 30 but close.
-Creating playlists using the Sony software is VERY easy. Type in a name, drag and drop files either on the player already or in your computer.


I could probably go on like this for a while because this unit has tons of little things that make me just love it. For all the bad rep NW-HD1 got for the Atrac format, it really delivered in terms of audio quality, ease of use, portability, and visuals. If you like solid construction units that are reliable (it really looks reliable despite the 90 day labor, 1 year parts warranty) and have 400 dollars to spend. I would get this over the iPod anyday.

As a sidenote, the unit IS smaller than an iPod. It is about the size of the iPod mini.

27 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Style Wars, October 14, 2004

By 

DMD 312 (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sony NW-HD1 20 GB Network Walkman Digital Music Player (Electronics)

I think whether or not you like the Sony comes down to a taste in style. I do not have any MP3 files on my computer, so I don't care about the lack of native MP3 support or converting CD's to ATRAC. The ATRACplus format sounds awesome and is better than Apple's AAC format because you can store more songs in a smaller space (that is, the Sony unit is smaller than the Apple 40GB unit). The 40GB iPod stores 10,000 songs in AAC format (or probably less in MP3 format). This Sony 20GB unit stores 10,000 songs in ATRAC3plus 64kbps format. These formats are basically equivalent to each other in terms of sonic quality, except that Sony allows for greater size compression. People complain about the SonicStage software and I will admit that it is not the best, but it also only took me 5 minutes to figure out without looking at the documentation. The battery life difference is not even a contest as the Sony goes for 27 hours while the iPod only goes for 12 hours.

I could have gone either way on the iPod vs Sony debate as I think both units are really nice. The Sony is just as easy to use as the iPod (admittedly, I am not as knocked out by that wheel as other people are). I am glad I got the Sony and recommend it to others.