Sony S710 Review
When Sony released the A820 in Europe and America, they dropped the noise cancellation feature and instead shoved it into the S610 and dubbed the new model S710. This left the users with a choice between noise cancellation or the bigger screen and Bluetooth support of the A820 series as the S710 is identical to it's predecessor except for the noise cancellation. The question is if this was a smart move by Sony or if splitting the new features like this wasn't such a good idea. Read on for a full review of the S710 noise canceling player.
- Quick Look
- Size: 47.4 x 84.6 x 16.2 mm
- Screen: 1.8” 320x240 262k Color
- MSRP: 4GB $150, 8GB $200
- Audio Support: MP3, WMA, AAC, PCM
- Video Support: MPEG 4, h264
- Rated Battery: 33 Hours Audio / 8 Hours Video
- Photo Support: JPG
- Transfer Protocol: MTP
- Other Features: FM Radio, Noise Cancellation
- Complete Specs
Accessories
The box the player came in was a special running on Sonystyle for mother's day (don't ask). Like the normal box it only includes the bare minimum: player, USB cable, earbuds, dock insert and papers/software. Additional accessories are available from Sony, but these are priced very high and you have to shell out $40 bucks for a AC charger, $50 for a cradle and $150+ for docks with speakers. There are also cases, a Bluetooth transmitter and a small dock port speaker available.
Design
The design is more or less identical to that of the S610. The only difference is the area around the headphone jack that's not a bit more bulky to allow for connection the included earbuds for using noise cancellation. Besides the jack there's a hardware button for turning noise cancellation on and off - personally I'd have liked that feature to be mapped to a software setting not a hardware button. The build quality has a cheap feel to it though it even though I've seen worse. Compared to the other Sony players the S710 has a more plastic feel to it and so does the buttons. Acceptable, but not the best.
Screen
The screen is a 1.8" 240x320 LCD screen with 262,000 colors. The physical size of the screen makes it hard to use for some people, but with that resolution you'll get a very detailed though small image. The viewing angle is almost 180 degrees and you won't have any problem viewing it from different angles like with many players.
Media Transfer
It's been a few years since Sony dropped SonicStage but it's still worth mentioning as a SonicStage player wouldn't even be worth reviewing. Sony now use MTP, which means you can drag and drop music and audio files as long as you have Windows XP or Vista. You should install WMP11 if you don't have it, as the MTP update that comes with it is required for transferring video. Using the WMP10 MTP i just got an error saying the file wasn't compatible. WMP11 MTP also allows you to make playlists by right clicking files without going through any kind of software to do it. Zenses also work with the S710 allowing you to scrobble tracks to last.fm so though the player don't support MSC/UMS you do get some nice features in return.
Also worth mentioning is the lack of any software to update the firmware of the player. This is one of the best things about Sony players in my opinion - they come with firmware 1.00 and stay that way. You won't need to update the firmware, simply because it works when you get it. Though this also means no new features, the Sony players are very straight to the point and not suitable for people who want games, text editors and calculators on their MP3 player. A stable firmware is therefor a great feature about the player and shouldn't be dismissed as something petty.
User Interface
Sony uses the same interface with slight modifications to fit FM and Bluetooth on all their S and A series players. It works well, so I see no harm in that. The main menu is a bit peculiar and I don't really see the logic in some of the shortcuts there. Both playlists, initial search and intelligent shuffle have gotten their own icons. In my opinion these belong under music and not on the main menu. "Now playing" also got it's own place in the main menu and this is something I really wish manufacturers would stop doing. Map it either to a hardware button or to the options menu regardless of where you are in the menu. Sony actually does have a shortcut to "now playing" in options so why would they need to use up menu space for it? The main menu should have Music, Video, Photos, Settings and Radio - maybe a new submenu for noise cancellation and drop the hardware key like mentioned before. To me the Sony main menu looks like a Symbian S60 device right out of the box - randomly arranged by monkeys - but without the option to rearrange it.
Navigating music is done by ID3 or folder mode, a combination that few manufacturers have seemed fit to include unfortunately. Albums can be browsed by means of title, album art, or both and offers a more graphical browsing experience. One very clever thing Sony has done with browsing is they added a horizontal scroll through letters in the alphabet along with vertical scrolling through the actual music list. This makes it so much easier to find what you're after and should be adopted by other manufacturers.
Video navigation is a bit more annoying, as it will read videos that's on the device and ignore folder structure. It gets rather annoying when you have 15 music videos and 10 episodes from TV shows and they are all mixed up. To make it worse the player sort videos by time and date added, so basically the entire video list is random. With photos however you're back to folder mode with alphabetical sorting. It's all rather annoying as I'm sure it would have cost them a lot to add both view modes on both features. Then again Sony did the same on the PSP - that time with photos viewing by date only and they've made it to FW 4.00 with that thing without bothering to change it so don't get your hopes up.
The button layout is very straight forward and works well. Directional buttons, play/pause, options, back, noise cancellation and volume controls. I already expressed my feelings about the noise cancellation button more than once so besides that it all works very well although it wouldn't have hurt to have some physical markings on the directional buttons to help grip and blind navigation.
One of the biggest surprises about getting a Sony player like the S710 is the startup time. The Sony doesn't really turn off but stay in some sort of sleep mode, meaning when you press the play button its on. It doesn't even take half a second. You also don't need to press play again to start playing, so basically when the player is off and you press play it starts playing right away without any delay. The nice thing too is that being in standby mode has little effect on its already long battery life.
Audio
The sound quality is Sony, meaning it's absolutely stellar. Sound output however could be better. Much better. Normal low impedance headphones work fine but having used the 37mW/channel D2 for over a year it's rather a slap in the face to barely be able to drive the Beyerdynamic DT770 80 ohm with the Sony. With a car stereo's line-in it even got outclassed by an iPod Touch as the Sony had way better sound but needed 3 times the volume on the car stereo to show it. Bottom line is that if you need the player to run high impedance phones without external amplification, look somewhere else.
The S710 is also filled to the brim with sound enhancements. These are just as randomly placed as the main menu with Equalizer and VPT(Sourround) being available from the options menu on the playback screen while DSEE, Clear Stereo and Dynamic Normalizer are only available through the main settings menu on the main screen. Don't ask me what the logic is, maybe the wanted to save space in the playback screen options menu. The enhancements themselves work better than most similar crap like SRS, but some are more peculiar than useful. The Surround settings do offer some very unusual ways of listening to your music but it's not exactly something I'd leave on. The most useful options are most likely the Equalizer and the ClearBass setting included in it, although it's not as good as mach3bass on Cowon players.
My last piece of whining about audio (and please bear in mind the S710 has excellent sound quality and I'm just nitpicking) is the volume scale. It has 30 levels, but still there's a lot of difference from one step to the next. Especially with low impedance phones and IEMs you'll maybe listen at max 10-12 of those 30 and that doesn't leave you a lot of room for fine tuning the volume.
Video
The S710 like other Sonys support the same format as iPods, Zune etc but it's a tad more picky about the specifications. Max resolution is 320x240 and max bitrate is 768kbps for video. It would not accept anything encoded with my command line h.264 encoder package which is rather typical for h.264 players - it's a demanding codec and unless its 100% right it won't work. Basically you'll have to rely on iPod converters to convert video and I found that SUPER worked very well using the iPod setting. Supporting the same formats as iPods that also mean you can find already converted video content in the form of video podcasts. 20 minute shows can be compressed down to only 45MB and still retain quality so you can fit a lot of video without losing quality.
Video quality is superb. The small screen means you need good eyes to be able to really watch anything on it, but the pixel density also means it's a very sharp image. You can choose orientation for video viewing and you can also zoom videos if you have videos that don't fit the entire screen. It also auto bookmarks videos so you continue where you left off even if you play other videos in between, a very useful feature. I wouldn't recommend watching full length movies on 1.8", but for TV shows and music videos it's very usable. The A720 or A820 series' would be better choices if you're going to use video a lot however, as it has the same video specs but twice the physical screen size.
Noise Cancellation
Noise cancellation was originally included in the Asian NW-A820 series, but the European/American NWZ-A820 series (brilliant model numbering Sony, not confusing at all) don't have this feature and it has instead been put into the S710. Noise cancellation works by having microphones on the end of the earbuds that pick up background noise, send it to the player which inverts the sound and send it back into your ear to effectively neutralize the noise. Sounds nice, but since this is the ONLY difference between the S710 and the S610 you basically pay an extra $50 for this feature alone. So is it worth it?
At first i didn't think so. It doesn't really block out human voices very well so if you're hoping to use this on a bus or whatnot it won't show you it's full potential. When I took it to work and the open cockpit tractor I use there however, it showed more of what it can do. I tested it on said tractor vs the noise ISOLATION of the Sennheiser CX300 and the noise cancellation was much more successful at letting me listen to my music in peace. It also works well if you simply turn down the volume of the music and use the noise cancellation by itself. It reduced the engine noise noticeable and it wasn't until i took it out I realized just how well it worked.
There is however a "but" - and a rather big one. The included earbuds/IEM hybrids aren't very comfortable and they are the only option to make the noise cancellation work. I know Sony and I predict that if they ever offer better phones to use with the S710 they'll cost about 5 times what they should. If the S710 was an iPod I would be more optimistic as headphone manufacturers seem to do whatever Apple commands (as proven by the iPhone compatible headphone jacks) and I think the noise canceling feature would really shine with a good pair of compatible phones. With Sony however I have little doubt we'll be stuck with the included buds forever and they are simply too uncomfortable to be worn for an extended period of time. To add to the annoyance the cord is too short and it's close to impossible to have the player in your pocket while wearing the phones if you're not a dwarf or stand perfectly still.
Other Features
Photo Viewer
The picture viewer is pretty standard. You can choose orientation like with video and there's also a slideshow option with adjustable speed. Quality is very good and it's both fast and efficient.
Radio
The radio has good reception and good sound. A lot of players have very weak radio reception and luckily the S710 isn't one of them. It has a preset function and auto scan along with a sensitivity option.
Battery Life
The battery life is very good for such a small player. Rated at 33 hours for audio, you can expect to get somewhere between 25-30 hours of real life use depending on how much you fiddle with the player. Using noise cancellation will reduce this dramatically as expected. Video battery life is rated at 8 hours, with real life values around 6-7 hours.
Conclusion
The S710 is a very good player with excellent sound quality, battery life, video quality and FM radio. The flaws it has are mostly minor, like too few steps on the volume control and a somewhat messy UI and shouldn't hold you back from buying it.
BUT, the S710 is just a a S610 with noise cancellation and even though the noise cancellation works very well the uncomfortable included earbuds which you are stuck with gives me little option but to recommend the S610 instead. It's $50 less - money you could spend getting some nice noise isolating IEMs. The only reason why you should buy the S710 would be if you desperately need maximum noise cancellation and have a very high acceptance for oddly shaped objects in your ear. Hopefully the S710 will replace the S610 with time and in the same price range, that way noise cancellation won't cost you an extra $50.
Pros
- Sound Quality
- Video Quality
- Radio Quality
- Instant On
- Battery Life
Cons
- Included Earbuds
- Messy UI
- Weak Ouput
- Volume Scale
Comments
Alex M on June 18, 2008 4:18 PM
I'm surprised they didn't have .WAV on this version.
I have the A728 and it's similar and it's a decent player.
What I don't like...
-No audio bookmarking! I can't do much about long files(~5 hour radio shows.) The FF/RW isn't good enough in these cases, but it could be worse(coughcoughIriverH10coughcough)
-smudge magnet
-not enough EQ tweaking, like the Cowon D2 has. I like my bass and the Sony doesn't do it.
I'd say go for this player though. Get the A728 if you're into bigger players. The A728 is actually significantly thinner(9.2mm I think). I mean the D2 is 16.6 mm so this is narrowly thinner.
skobbolop on June 18, 2008 5:57 PM
Does the s610 have a weak output too, or is it stronger compared to the s710?
pudsey456 on June 19, 2008 2:07 AM
You should mention that the MTP support can be disabled from device manager, so that the player becomes truly UMS even in Windows. Though not as obvious as the way iRiver does it, this is a very nice perk Sony has thrown in that some other MTP manufacturers don't allow for.
Skobbolop on June 19, 2008 6:19 AM
and what about the s610?... is it possible to make it UMS like s710?
Markosh on June 19, 2008 11:23 PM
I would just like to add that i've had my 8GB S618 since last October and i still adore it. I know it will turn into a long term love affair. And this is coming from someone whose been on the DAP train for a while now.
kenn on June 28, 2008 1:12 PM
So can we get confirmation on that UMS pudsey456 mentioned? Yay or nay? How is it disabled. Windows or on-device?
I assume the battery is non-removable?
jonnathan on June 28, 2008 11:25 PM
It's true you can on windows, I did it myself. There is a way to remove the battery but you would need to take apart the player there is directions which you can get if you find the service manual (I know there is one somewhere...)
Dave on July 19, 2008 12:22 PM
Just wanted to pitch in my 2 cents as an owner of this player for one month now. I suspect the comfort of the included earbuds may be very subjective--I don't find them uncomfortable, although like all noise cancelling systems there is a slight sensation of pressure in your ears when the n/c is on.
I use the n/c while commuting by bus and it does a wonderful job dampening the engine noise. (I'm actually happy being able to hear voices--which are still dampened somewhat by the n/c--as I'd like to be aware if the drunks in the seat behind me get into a fight.) I can't imagine going back to any other player.
Wayne on July 24, 2008 10:45 PM
It's great
I like the audio effect of sony mp3 player and the audio cancellation technique. But I want to buy the 820-
Scott on August 3, 2008 12:04 AM
The specs list on this article says there is no dedicated hardware volume control. The description in the user manual I downloaded looks like there is. Which is correct?
Mac on August 26, 2008 6:32 AM
Is this better than the A728/820 players?
Timberg on September 26, 2008 12:53 PM
I use this player with a pair of Sennheiser CX300-B earbuds ($30), and combined with the Sony Walkman's outstanding EQ allowances, these two pieces of hardware provide the fullest, highest-quality sound I've found on any portable device. Period. I highly recommend this unit (and the Sennheisers) for anyone whose primary concern is sound quality.
Jason on December 12, 2008 11:18 PM
Sony actually released firmeare 1.02 for this player on 10/28/2008.