Sony NW-E75 MP3 player

MP3 player plays MP3s shocker

Now here's a novel idea from Sony: a portable digital music player - what most of us call an MP3 player - that actually plays MP3s. Well, almost. What the rather natty little NW-E75 actually does is take your exciting MP3 files and convert them into Sony's proprietary ATRAC3 codec when you transfer them across to the player. Not perfect, but at least you'll be spared the indignity of re-ripping your whole collection.

Sony also ups the ante with its SonicStage file-management software. This is a vital component in any digital music system, and Sony's past offerings - including some misguided notions about "checking" your music in and out (that's your music, folks) - sucked. This latest incarnation, while not perfect, is a lot better and pretty intuitive to use.

Transfer times to the player via USB 2.0 are good, apart from when copying MP3s across, where the conversion takes far too long. Still, the results are well worth it, as this is one of the best-sounding flash players we've heard. Fiddling with the transfer rates and formats produced interesting differences in quality, but the good news is that the ATRAC3 compression at 64Kbps produced passable results. This is vital to a player with such limited capacity, as it means you can squeeze on around ten albums. We still wouldn't advise clicking the option that transfers tracks at 48Kbps though, as this is a step too far down the quality ladder for our ears.

So it's well done to Sony for producing a neat, easy-to-use and good-sounding audio player. All that's left to do now is scour the shops to find it cheaper!