Sony Gigajuke NAS50HDE 170W 80GB Hdd Dab Hi-fi

I agree with all Dave Miller''s criticisms but cannot find anything good about the system at all. Maybe this is because I want to use it to play classical music.. 1) Sound quality - with the speakers provided, this is very poor - very limited high frequency. It is somewhat better when I play it into our 20 year old speakers.. 2) Editing information - absolutely appalling. Significantly worse than a mobile phone without predictive text. Four to six key presses to get a capital letter, seven key presses to get a number, fifteen or so key presses to get a zero. 3) Playing modes. I would like to be able to play classical music in random order. However, symphonies, sonatas, chamber music typically have 3 or 4 tracks, which I certainly do NOT want played in random order. I have been able to do this, with some juggling with both an IPOD and a SONY NW HD, but the only way possible with the GigaJuke would be to create a playlist where I place the items in random order. Given the appalling interface, this would be almost impossible and there would be no way of checking that I had included everything. 4) Connecting to a network. I managed to do this with a wired conenction, but as Dave Miller says, wireless connection is impossible. I am advised to contact my network adminstrator, but since that is me, this is not much help. Thsi may be because I do not have Buffalo adapter. I had no idea what this is, but learn from Dave that it has long since been discontined. 5) Connecting to a USB device. It was only after delving deep into the manual that I discovered why it could not communicate with any of my USB hard disks. As Dave says, these have to be in FAT format which has not been used for years. I did eventually manage to find out, using a very helpful discussion web-sites, how to create a 32GB FAT partition on one of my drives, so I could edit all the music information on my PC, transfer to the FAT drive, and then download to the Gigajuke. 6) Connecting to a PC. Since I cannot connect the unit wirelessly to my network, I am unable to communicate with my PC. I cannot make any sense ot the Network Media section. 7) DAB radio. The antenna supplied gives only a few stations, none of which I want. We have two portable DAB radios which work perfectly well with the radios'' own antennae, so I cannot understand why this should be. 8) FM radio. Do. I should have bought a set of good speakers and an amplifier, and used my IPOD or NW HD to do what I want. I would have wasted much less time and money.

My wife and I bought this music system shortly after Christmas. It appeared to have everything we wanted - DAB, a hard drive to store music, USB ports for easy file transfer, the ability to connect to the internet, the ability to network with your PC, and great sound quality for a small system. We began by putting most of our music collection from CD onto the hard drive. A standard rip, where you can select the bit rate for MP3, or convert it to a number of formats including Sony''s proprietary ATRAC. The default is MP3 at 128kbps and at that rate you can store upwards of 1200 hours of music on the system. It took about 6-7 mins for an average length CD and was a simple case of putting the CD in the slot and hitting one button. The machine would then search it''s Gracenote database, and find the CD title and track titles and rip the CD. Perfect. For those CD''s that it can''t find, entering them manually using the remote control is a pain - it''s effectively just like texting but without predictive text - it takes ages and I would prefer to have seen some sort of keypad. There is the capacity to connect to the net, which I have yet to successfully achieve wirelessly. From what U understand, this allows the Gracenote facility to check for latest titles not within it''s database, but does not allow for streaming of internet radio, which frankly is a bit of an oversight. A very useful function is the x-DJ facility which will analyse your music and categorise it into 23 classes - e.g Jazzy, Lounge, Recommended Morning, Late Night, Party etc. and also into Genres and you can play tracks from the same Genre or Artist on the fly by the press of one button. The Analysis is done in standby mode, and took about 3 days to complete for loading 120ish Cds. The DAB radio is reasonable using the useless antenna provided, but to get the best reception you need to have an external antenna. Be prepared to have to hook it up to the TV aerial for best reception. The AM/FM is standard as you would expect. There is also the facility to hook up to a shared folder on your PC and to fileshare music stored there. When I set this up I will probably opt to store a copy of my music on the PC rather than hook up an external drive to the unit, since the back-up procedure is a pain. So far, so good. But all is not rosy. Like many others I have found it impossible to connect wirelessly to the internet. The manual specifies a Buffalo WLI-U2-KG54 USB adapter. Be warned, this type of adapter has long since been discontinued. I bought the WLI-U2-KG54-AI-3 which is the same thing but with an automatic install of it''s driver software for XP and Vista PCs. Plug that in, and nothing happens. It simply will not pick up the wireless signal from my BT HomeHub router stationed not more than 3 metres away. An identical adapter works like a charm from my desktop PC, but no joy with the Gigajuke. Also, the USB ports on the machine are not the high speed USB2.0 we have all become used to, but the older USB1.1 with it''s much slower transfer rate. Frankly it doesn''t make much of a difference once the music is on the machine, but it is a wonder that a USB2.0 wasn''t installed. Also, the back-up facility specifies that the external drive must be in the FAT32 file format. FAT32?! Is this 1999? For the uninitiated this was the file system that Windows ME and previous operating systems were designed for and was notable for its instability. Why NTFS compatibilty wasn''t installed I have no idea. Another gripe is the screen size. You need to be at least as close as a metre to be able to read what it says. I appreciate the unit has been designed to be as small as possible, but it makes little sense having a remote when you need to be within touching distance of the unit to be able to read the display. Lastly, whilst you can dock a walkman and transfer files, you cannot connect an iPod at all. I thought it might recognise it as a mass storage device, but no joy. Fair enough though, as Sony are protecting their own interests. In summary, good sound quality, plenty of disc space, and a very useful x-DJ function make this machine well worth considering. However to get the most functionality out of it you have to be close to an aerial socket for the DAB, and close to a broadband router for a wired connection via the ethernet port. For big bucks (£400+ mark) you expect the best, but there are enough annoyances with this machine to advise leaving it to the early adopters.