My writing a short review for 10,000 Birds on the new Sony Walkman (the NWZ-A81* series) might seem a bit like someone from a hi-fi magazine writing about warblers, but I’m pretty sure that just as some audiophiles must have something interesting to say about small and pretty birds I must have something worth saying about a small and very pretty MP3 player (let’s hope so or the next few minutes will be somewhat pointless). Besides which, I think this is something many travelling birders will want to read about - I don’t know about you but I spend far too much of my life on planes, in buses, and sat alone in hotel rooms trying to get to sleep not to want to listen to some music from home occasionally…

The last time I actually owned a Walkman (or anything similar) it was a plasticky thing that played the now virtually extinct and unlamented cassette tape - a hissy thing prone to snapping (much like an ex-girlfriend of mine thinking about it). I thought it was marvellous of course, but it wasn’t. It was cutting-edge for the 1980s but unless you’ve been living in a cave somewhere for twenty years you’ve probably noticed that Personal Music Payers (PMPs) have improved in the same way that the first boxy and awful Japanese cars have evolved into the Lexus or the Mazda RX-7. As good as they are though - well, I don’t know, I just couldn’t be bothered to buy anything that required me learning odd file extensions, how to navigate extensive menus, understand the ins-and-outs of a click-wheel, and seemed to be all about having to go online to buy music. I’m sure that makes me sound like some old dinosaur, but I’m not: I’m fairly computer literate but things are getting so bloody difficult to use - my mobile phone, for example, has so many functions I haven’t even found half of them yet. You know, I just want to be able to make a phone-call and use a Bluetooth headset when I’m driving…

In many ways computers are getting easier to use, and I always had a feeling that eventually someone would bring to market a PMP (which is basically a small computer for playing music) that not only looked good, but sounded great and was easy to use. In a world dominated by Apple’s i-Pod (and shortly to be dominated even further by the hugely beautiful i-Touch), the new NWZ-A815 - the 2GB version is the 815, the 4Gb is the 816, and the 8Gb is the 818 - must be seen as Sony’s attempt to get back a substantial chunk of the PMP market. Should they succeed the profits would be absolutely enormous of course - and I for one think they’re getting there with this functional and superb-sounding piece of kit.

Why after so many years of music-free travel would I suddenly find my passions re-ignited? Actually it was all down to a review in a “gadget mag” which gave the NWZ-A815 a 5-star review (T3 - Dec 07), and opened with the words “A metallic wafer of video and sound” next to a photo of a small, sleek bit of machinery with proper buttons with words printed by them that say things like “Pwr Off” and “Back”. I went online to check out other reviews and they all more or less said the same thing: this was a solid, well-made, highly-rated player, with good battery life (about 25 hours if you stick to music, about 8 if you play video), great functionality, and probably the best mini-headphones currently bundled with anything for c) £100. To cap it all Sony have finally ditched their hugely under-supported ATRAC codec for MP3 and WMA and replaced SonicStage with Media Player 11 (which comes on an accompanying CD if you haven’t got it on your computer). What this means in simple terms is that it is now so easy to copy a track off your music collection (or “rip” it) and get it onto the player - you just drag and drop using Windows Explorer which sees the Sony as an external hard-drive - that I was up and running within a few minutes of opening the instruction manual for the first time. It is astonishingly easy to do - great news for those of us who haven’t grown up surgically attached to an MP3 player and intuitively understand every last trick they have up their shiny sleeves.

And when you do start to play your music - the sound is fantastic. In an earlier incarnation I was a music fanatic and spent thousands of pounds putting together a really good hi-fi (based around Naim amplifiers and Mission floorstanding speakers). I’m very fussy about what I let into my ears actually, and I’m really impressed how a machine about the same size as a playing card can sound so darn good. Both high and low frequencies are surprisingly well-handled, and bass-lines are tight and easily followed. No matter how good the processor, though, if the headphones feeding the sound to your brain are rubbish then so will be what you hear. The i-Pods little white buds on their white wires are iconic, but they reproduce sound badly and fall out all too easily: the Walkman’s earphones employ a twin driver design in which the smaller treble driver is inserted inside the ear canal and the larger bass driver sits in the outside of your ear, like standard headphones. They’re comfortable, go loud enough for anyone not looking to go deaf, and stay put. Can’t ask for much more than that really.

I may well be coming over as some sort of hermit who’s just been shown electricity for the first time, but the Walkman is also a lovely container for digital photos. I uploaded a large folder of pics I took of Evie and Jo last week to see what the Walkman would do with them. Most of the images are around 3.5Mbs (ie big) and within a few seconds they’d been stored and were being replayed at screen-size in a nice “fade-in/fade-out” slide-show. Not a big deal for most people, but I often get asked by other crew on the plane if I have pictures of Evie: now I don’t have to get out my lap-top to be the proud dad. I just pull this sliver of black and silver out of my pocket and give my audience a show far longer than they thought they were asking for.

The Walkman plays video too. Its screen has a 320×240 resolution and it has ability to playback video at 30fps. A new Walkman here in the UK comes pre-loaded with a short trailer for Spiderman 3, and I have to say it looks amazing. The screen can be set to ‘Landscape’ and despite being just two inches wide the clarity is incredible. However, video format support is limited to MPEG4/H.264 which does limit what you can upload. Whether I would actually want to watch a whole movie on a screen that size is debatable anyway - frankly, I’ve other sources if I want to watch video. Critics have similarly noted that the NWZ-A815 doesn’t have an FM radio. If I’d have wanted a radio I’d have bought one. In fact if I had wanted an all-singing, all-dancing player that looks good and does everything I might have gone for the stunning i-Touch, but then again the 4Gb Walkman is available for just under £100.00 whilst the i-Touch costs around £250.00 - and I’d have needed to replace the headphones with something decent as well.

No, all I wanted was a straightforward PMP that is light as a feather, is small enough to fit easily into a shirt pocket, can hold a few songs (the 4Gb I bought will hold around 1000), looks good, has enough juice to see me through a journey from A to B and onto D,E,F and G - and whose sound isn’t an insult to my drums. And I’m confident I’ve found it…