MPMan F60

Seems that solid-state digital audio players do not get enough love on this forum So I figured I start a thread. This is my MPMan F60 from late 2001 - early 2002, don't remember for sure when exactly I bought it. Still have it. It still works. Still has the same files on it as twenty years ago.

It has built-in microphone, so can be used as an audio recorder. And it also has built-in radio. But I really haven’t used these functions much. It is about as thick as a cassette case, but significantly smaller in two other dimensions. The unpainted aluminum body can withstand some rough handling, it does not crack, but bends easily. The power comes from a single AA battery.

The player uses SmartMedia cards, which were popular twenty years ago, but failed to capture the market because their capacity was limited to 128 MB, so these are the highest-capacity cards I could get. They were sold for about $50 twenty years ago, they are still sold for the same price now on eBay. People who sell them probably pull them out from old digital cameras, which also used these cards.

And this is my 1996 Sony Vaio with Pentium III and 256 MB of RAM. Still works.



And here is a video if anyone cares:

 

http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/sony-network-walkman-personal-stereos.5800/
Apart from a very low end Creative all my players are Sony or Apple. I agree with a colleague who explaining his choice of a 160GByte iPod classic said that he couldn't see the point of a player that won't hold your entire music collection. I bought a 64GByte iPod Touch new and although I have used it online, never loaded any music onto it due to the limited memory capacity (choosing what to put on it would take too much time) I do like the NW-A25 I got recently which currently has a 200GByte micro-SD card in it. Now that's what I call Music capacity.

 

If you watched the video, I explained that I specifically did not want to sync my player with my "library" like iPod offered. I wanted to use it like a cassette or CD player, replacing cards. The thinking was, I would have no more than two hours per card, or less if I increase bitrate. I would have a tiny album art on the card's box, and maybe even teeny-tiny lists of songs, folded and tucked in the box. I wanted to have dozens of cards, like cassettes. Maybe I should redo the video to include all this justification for having removable cards.

This did not pan out, but I am still not sure that I want to have a centralized library, and I want to sync my player - or players - with it. To start with, I don't have a central library All my files are here and there, on three desktops and four laptops and on a bunch of CDs, recorded twenty years ago. Maybe if I were more organized, it would work for me. Even my streaming playlists are scattered across several services, one of which is now defunct.

 

On my way to work so will watch it tonight. I see your point about removable cards though. That is something I only got recently with the high end Sonys. A different colleague actually bought three or four really cheap players so he could have "the prog rock player" "the classical player" etc. That is another approach.

 

Here is an interesting device from the era of Smartmedia cards
https://www.dpreview.com/articles/3796677409/fuji40i

A few years ago you could still buy new Smartmedia cards but there don't seem to be as many around now.
I have an Olympus camera that uses them.

An interesting change is how Sony players now allow simple drag and drop file transfer in either direction.
As I commented in the Sony Network Walkman thread the Sonicstage software needed to use the earlier players
was always criticised in reviews.
I have to admit buying a used un-reset player is as interesting as finding a box of used cassettes at a car boot sale.
One I bought had the entire top 40 from about four consecutive weeks, eight years or so earlier.

 

I have an Olympus digital camera with - wait for it - 1.3 MPix sensor! Saves to SmartMeda cards.

The cheapest SM cards I see on eBay go for about $25. Average: $45-$50 for 128 MB capacity.

 

Mine is a 2Mpixel C2020Z bought for its fame infrared capabilities.
https://johnpowellefiap.wordpress.com/2013/10/29/olympus-c2020z-is-king/
One day I must buy an infra red filter and try them out.

 

Regarding solid state players, I still have an iRiver S10, still working but the battery is pretty weak.
I was a big iRiver fan back then.
When I was looking for an upgrade from my iRiver SlimX iMP-350, I was also considering iPods but the H140 was the clear winner - now with a new battery and a 120GB HDD
I also own a H10.
The H10 and H140 are not solid state, they have HDDs.

 

@HWTest, I wanted iRiver iMP-350 so much back then, did not get a chance to buy it. It is slim, and AFAIK it plays MP3 gapless, doesn't it? One of the few gapless MP3 players. Recently I bought a Panasonic SL-CT582 on eBay, it is not as slim as the iRiver, but slim enough. Does not play gapless MP3 though.

 

It was expensive but definitely worth it.
If I remember correctly, it played gapless. I didn't use for some time, the gumsticks are dead and the external battery box makes it uncomfortably bulky.

 

Gumsticks are much easier to buy now online, not like back then.

> The H10 and H140 are not solid state, they have HDDs.

I did not want HDD, and did not want iPod, so the T60 was a logical choice

 

A tip regarding the hard disk based players. On some of them it is fairly easy to swap the hard drive for a compact flash card.
I have a 32GByte iPod Mini where the swap was as simple as unplugging the Microdrive, plugging in the CF card then doing a reformat from iTunes.

Some are much more difficult or have limitations on the maximum card size. I don't anyone has ever managed to even replace the hard disk in a Sony with another hard disk. Read up up before you attempt anything.

 

Yeah... I was thinking about replacing a microHDD in my HDD-based camcorder, but so far have not done anything about it. Supposedly, it is as simple as you described. The HDD still works, and the capacity is sufficient: 40 GB, good for 6 hours of video at about 15 Mbit/s bitrate.

 

@MisterX Very cool design !

I have found this ebay listing which states it uses a 5GB hard-drive: https://www.ebay.com/itm/265106381024
Seems much smaller than SONY's NW-HD series though.

I am interested in adding some vintage digital players in my collection since I bought the SONY NW-E95 and was surprised by how good it sounded.
I only have a couple of SONY network walkmans at this point, apart from modern players.

 

I have a dedicated DAP that I bought recently. I bought it for my son, but he prefers his smartphone, figures. The DAP supposedly can do MP3 gapless, but I haven't checked it yet. It has built-in battery, so needs to be charged via USB. Turns on in about 5 seconds, too long for my taste. When it turns on, it sets the volume at a pre-set level (can be changed in the menu), not like it was when it was turned off, annoying. Also, it boots up into the main menu, so I need to navigate back to where it was playing to play a track. At least it remembers the last track that was played and the last position.

This is a common complaint I read in reviews that one cannot operate a DAP without looking at a menu, and that buttons are usually too small or it is touch-screen. In this regard, the MPMan can be operated in "blind mode", starts up in less than 2 seconds, remembers the volume and the track position. Some things were better back then

 

The old SONY network walkmans have similar characteristics to your MPMan.

For example, the SONY NW-E95 operates on a single AAA battery, powers on instantly, also remembers the volume and track position.
And it's smaller than a box of matches as a reference. Plays both mp3 and ATRAC (Sony proprietary format).
The only downside is you need either a virtual machine to run WindowsXP or an older computer/laptop in order to transfer the files. The driver doesn't work on Windows 1o.
But I happen to have a small collection of old laptops and I use one of those to transfer files on the old network walkmans.

I do agree with your initial statement that DAPs are underrated on this forum. There are a lot of models that were released in the past, some of them suprisingly small.

 

This is the other one besides the MPMan that I have: AGPTEK Rocker. Haven't got around to make a video about it.

 

I posted about my collection near the top of the thread but here is the link again
http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/sony-network-walkman-personal-stereos.5800/
I draw the line at those needing SonicStage software which unfortunately rules out quite a few of the coolest looking models. I like the looks of the ones that look like metallic pebbles which Mister X posted an advert for yesterday.

 

I saw that thread before, now I remember. From what I know and have seen on devices that I own, SonicStage is only required for converting wav to ATRAC. For mp3, the OS sees the player as a USB Mass storage device.

The one in the advert is NW-A1000/A3000. There's a review of it from 2010: https://www.cnet.com/reviews/sony-nw-a1000-walkman-review/
This one is clearly a newer model and might have better driver compatibility with new OSs. Have seen a lot of these on local auction sites (even one new in box), but haven't bought one yet.
The silver one seems to be the most common, although now that I see there were other colors, I start to like it more.