Sounds Better

[kingandy]

Not sure if I mentioned this: I bought a new stereo just after Christmas. It was good, excellent sound quality and a familiar brand (a Hitachi AXM136i), so I was confident that it would be fine despite it being a Curry/Dixon/PCWorld exclusive. (I think the "exclusive" part was the packaged iPod dock.) Also it was on sale, about 2/3 normal price, so win.

Within a month it developed a fault (overnight becoming unresponsive to controls, requiring unplug/replug to resolve - inconvenient at the best of times, and at worst rendering the alarm function useless). Took it back and got an identical replacement - and within a month it developed an identical fault.

Naturally, with the second replacement, I decided to go for a different model. I mean, I don't know if it's a general fault with the line or just with that Curry's batch, but I just didn't feel like risking it again. I went for a Sony, and wow, it's so much better, even though it's around the same retail price as the Hitachi's reduced sale price. Quick comparison of key points:

	Hitachi AXM136i	Sony CMT-BX70
iPod dock	Plug in thing on extension lead	Built into unit
Standby light	Bright blue LED which lights up whole room	Soft unobtrusive red LED
While playing CD	Another, brighter blue light lights up the whole room even more	It just plays it
Alarm function	Turns unit on, using whatever function happens to be selected when it was turned off	Allows function to be selected when setting alarm, so you can go to bed listening to iPod and wake up to radio
After checking time with unit on standby	Display remains on, but at least the blue light goes away	Display switches off after 8 seconds
Remote sensitivity	You have to point it right at the unit	Vague approximation of direction will do
Station name display	BBC RADI	BBC R2

It's, you know, little things like that; tiny points of usability that make the Hitachi unit basically unsuitable for use as a bedroom stereo and unsatisfying in general. Even without the Halt Until Reboot bug I was finding it fiddly and not 100% satisfying - the Sony's much better off the bat. I think there's a slight loss in sound quality (the Hitachi was 100W, the Sony is closer to 50) but it's not noticeable and certainly worth the £60 saving.

Oh - one flaw with the Sony - it doesn't come with a DAB antenna included. This isn't as big a problem as it might seem, though, as the internal one seems to work quite well, but I was still glad I had one lying about the place from an older unit.

Comments

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Hitatchi are very much like the old Amstrads, functional but not well designed. Although Sony have had a few misteps (MiniDisc anyone) they certainly have a better record with designing and manufacturing consumer electronics.

Shame they're schizophrenically evil really.

[kingandy]

Ah, it was actually very much like the one that used to be in your front room, though mine knew how to automatically pick up the time from DAB.

Come to think of it that is also something that the Sony doesn't do. In the interests of fairness I should probably mention that the Sony remote doesn't have numbers on it (though it does have radio presets). It doesn't stray far from BBCR1/2, though, so that's no real problem for me.

[stsquad.livejournal.com]

Ahh, my CD player. I was quite happy with that as a piece of kit (despite being Hitachi) but I don't really use it as any more than a CD player (or technically an amp for the AUX input). Certainly it would bug me in my bedroom.

[kingandy]

And in fairness to MiniDisc, I expect the actual players - and user experience - was excellent. Certainly people who used them sang their prayers. Even as a portable music medium they were easier to navigate than tapes and more re-usable than CDs. It's not Sony's fault that they were superseded by music players with self-contained data storage, the MiniDisc was an admirable mid-stage evolution of the form.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

They totally skipped me by, pretty much. Someone handed me one back in the early noughties and I had to check I was in the right reality.

[kingandy]

Well, yes, the Penny Farthing was an admirable mid-stage evolution of its form but you wouldn't use one in the Tour de France. Not seriously, anyway.

[ed-fortune.livejournal.com]

Y'see, I now want someone to develop a mountain and stunt version of a penny farthing. With rocket boosters...

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

Until very recently they were the preferred option for playback and effects in a theatre setting, and are still in use in very many places - we carry minidisc equipment for most gigs still (although we're moving to other solutions now as well).

I have a small mini-disc player for mobile music, not that I carry it anymore, and I have a head unit for a car stereo that takes mini-discs as well (if I get a car that can have a stereo again, I shall consider putting it back in!) - but that's more because I had access to decent grade stuff to make up the discs in the first place...

[anne-l-davies.livejournal.com]

Yep, my Friends Who Are in A band still have an MD player - and they still use it for the backing tracks at their gigs. Nice little bit of kit. Strudier than both a tape or a CD, with the individual track accesibility of a CD.

A shame they never took off commercially though, the storage space required is also much smaller than CDs or tapes.

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

Icon love!

[kingandy]

From here, in case you've never seen it...

[freddiefraggles.livejournal.com]

I had a bit of a google around to see what it was, looks nuts. Bit like all modern music, unfortunately.

[redhillian.livejournal.com]

In fairness to Hitachi, the station name display may not have been them - they just draw the information from the live feed, which every so often changes (or is updated), and I've seen the "more characters than maximum display" on Radio 2 as well.

But you know what, it still sounds like a better deal to me!

[kingandy]

My old stereo (stolen at the beginning of last year) said "BBC R2" as well. It did occur to me that they were only as accurate as the broadcast, but it seemed unlikely that it would have changed to "BBC RADIO 2" and back in that space of time. And simultaneously with my exchanging my stereo. More likely that the clever Sony (and former Denon) was clever enough to realise it was too long, see "RADIO", and strip it down on the assumption that people would be aware.

Unless there are two different title fields, which is of course possible.

Worth mentioning, of course, that a long station name gets scrolled around on the Hitachi - but you have to wait a few seconds which is really aggravating when you're trying to flip past BBC Radio 1, BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live to get to BBC Radio 7. (6Music, of course, was easier to spot, but alphabetically out of sequence...)