Sony GigaJuke Hifi

[JP]

call that a hi-fi?

http://www.pocketcalculatorshow.com/boombox/golden2.html

Now THAT's a hi-fi. Where did it all go wrong, there must be someone other than me that wants a MP3 player that looks and sounds like this?

I'm convinced my brother had one of those top ones!!!

[wakka]

Omg, precursor to the now ubiquitous ****ty iPod hifi dock thing.

[sadat]

i went crazy on ebay when i found that site and now have several of them dotted about. they do look beautiful - there's no other word - and i vaguely remember walking down my street playing my music on one of them back in the day. couldn't imagine people doing that now! they EAT batteries, and are worth every penny. the sound quality on the ones i have, which were by no means the most pricey or in the best condition, is pretty damn good.

[DrJohn]

The key thing that all of you are missing is that the GigaJuke is a network device. If you download the manual from Sony's web site, you will see that you can easily hook it up to your LAN (or WLAN with an adapter). So copying files to the hard disk can be achieved through your local LAN from your PC - much faster and more convenient than a USB cable!

You can also stream music from your PC or network storage device, so the 80GB hard disk is not a limiting factor. Especially as I have 500GB hard disk in my Qnap NAS.

Personally I think the GigaJuke is a huge step in the right direction as you get good sound plus a very flexible product - all for much less than the price of all the individual components.

[DrJohn]

The key thing that all of you are missing is that the GigaJuke is a network device. If you download the manual from Sony's web site, you will see that you can easily hook it up to your LAN (or WLAN with an adapter). So copying files to the hard disk can be achieved through your local LAN from your PC - much faster and more convenient than a USB cable!

You can also stream music from your PC or network storage device, so the 80GB hard disk is not a limiting factor. Especially as I have 500GB hard disk in my Qnap NAS.

Personally I think the GigaJuke is a huge step in the right direction as you get good sound plus a very flexible product - all for much less than the price of all the individual components.

Well I wrote all that before actually owning a Sony GigaJuke NAS-50HDE.

The product is a nice idea and it looks great too, but it falls down badly when it comes to the network features. After hours of tinkering with TwonkyVision settings in an attempt to have the Sony NAS-50HDE to recognize its existence, I gave up.

The Sony failed to connect to both my QNAP TS-101 running TwonkyVision or my laptop running either TwonkyVision or On2Share. Also the Sony failed to copy mp3 files reliably from a network share onto its own internal hard disk. All this leads me to the conclusion that the Sony is clearly a prototype, let loose on an unsuspecting public who will have no technical knowledge to ascertain the product failings in a timely manner.

Fortunately Currys gave me a full refund for the Sony, so at least I do not have to put up with the product's shortcomings

I have now got a Pinnacle SoundBridge HomeMusic which works just fine with my QNAP running TwonkyVision. However, these products are clearly in their infancy as the initial setup of the SoundBridge is a real pain as it needs two firmware upgrades before it will connect to a secure wireless network!!

[On The Edge of Insanity]

Music playback has gone from Vinyl > Cassette > CD > MP3. Improvements all the way to MP3 when music quality has taken a serious nosedive. Seriously 128k MP3 sounds s**t. Near CD quality I think not. Above 500k sounds pretty good though.

As this thread has popped up near the top again I thought I'd take issue with this.

Vinyl has much better sound quality than Cassette, in fact that situation parallels what we have currently, with people willing to sacrifice sound quality for convenience.

People in some circles will even tell you that Vinyl sounds better than CD, which for certain music I think holds very true.

[saif]

I think what sounds "better" depends on the production. Most modern music is produced for CD but some of it will be for mini hi-fis. i remember reading about the compressed sound on oasis CDs meant that for mini-hi-fis they sounded fine but they miss something on actual hi-fis. I concur but I still think they music is good so the sound takes a back seat.
I imagine a few bands, especially the newer ones, may actually assume mp3 playback and design for compression.

[JP]

People in some circles will even tell you that Vinyl sounds better than CD, which for certain music I think holds very true.

There isn't a better or worse to any of these formats, each one handles certain things better or worse than the others. The only way to fairly judeg which is best is to judge it subjectively in reference to what it is that you want from your audio.

I've grown to dislike the inadequacies that vinyl has in the lower side of the spectrum but also I dislike the fact that digital music has a far more sterile sound...even though I know the warmth of vinyl is purely down to harmonic distortion.

I dislike MP3s as they serve no purpose to me at all due to the sound quality and minimal space savings when compared to high quality lossless encodes such as using a better quality FLAC encoder.

I'm really hoping that there will be some lossless Blu-ray audio discs produced in the future as the extra space and bandwidth should make the sound incredible.

Also, the type of printing can make a world of difference! The sound on a well pressed 180mg virgin vinyl is amazing!!