Sony HAP-Z1ES

[Nuz1]

Looks great!! I'll be anxious to hear your impressions on the sound once it's had a chance to settle in. Also curious if you can hear a difference between FLAC and DSD files.

[Masterlu]

Jeff... Let me know too; I've been too busy to take mine out of the box.

[harri009]

Also guys I was a a bit worried when I ordered the sony as I use a Mac and have the most recent OS which is not on the list as being supported. I emailed sony before purchasing a few times to ask questions and never could get past the manual reader workers. They infact said the the new Mac OS is not supported. I am happy to say I have had no problem using the transfer software with the newest OS. I have only transferred a few files at a time since I was in a time crunch this morning to play with it as we are heading out of town for a couple days. The transfer speeds over wifi were about 500mb a min. I didn't have a chance to test the wired speeds before we left. I can tell you that everything feels very sold in software and hardware functionality.

[Nuz1]

Thanks for letting me know about the review. I don't subscribe to the mag any longer after finding AA. But I'll watch for it to be posted on-line so I can compare.

Originally Posted by tima

The latest Absolute Sound has a full review. I like the approach to focus on a network interface (versus optical) and support for a host of file formats.

[Orb]

HiFiNews also done a review this month, both this and also the amp.
They touched on regarding disabling DSD remastering and how it is buried pretty deep in the menus but as already mentioned it can be disabled.

Overall they gave the them 85% (a very good score), they also went on to say the amp is very special and in their view the star product.
Ivan, maybe you will be trying the amp as well?
Seems to be very well engineered.

Edit:
Appreciate this is not the amp section but I better mention the Sony amp requires a benign load as circuit protection kicks in below 4ohms.
Just mentioning in case it catches some out who are interested in the product.
Cheers
Orb

[harri009]

The sony takes about 24 hours of constant run time to start sounding its best. While the sound was never bad it did sound "different" for those first 24. I am happy to say that its sounding very good right now.

[Masterlu]

Originally Posted by harri009

The sony takes about 24 hours of constant run time to start sounding its best. While the sound was never bad it did sound "different" for those first 24. I am happy to say that its sounding very good right now.

[harri009]

A couple nights ago I started the LONG process of transferring music. I started with the files I have in iTunes stored on my laptop. This equates to roughly 300gb of music. I have the sony plugged directly into the router but I left the laptop on wireless for the transfer. It was easy enough to get going. All you have to do is basically target the iTunes music folder in the HAP transfer software and say go. About 24 hours later the music was transferred but only showed a few extra selections on the screen of the sony. I did a rescan of the internal harddrive thinking it would need to rescan for the added material. This took another 6 hours only to have deleted the few extra songs it was showing. So I decided that heck maybe I need to shut it down and give it a few hours to rest and cool down. Once I clicked the off button it told me it was going to update the data base and it would turn off after it finished. About 12 hours later it finished updating and turned off. Apparently this is what needed to be done all along. When I turned it back on all the music was there and ready to be played!! Success!! I am pretty sure I could have skipped the rescan process and just made it update the data base. So today I am going to dive into the external hard drive which is quite a but bigger (4tb worth) . The sony uses a proprietary Lenox format which apparently cannot be read by a Mac or windows without buying a 3rd party program to connect. Sony just says that your computer cannot read it. So with that being said you have to plug a blank drive into the sony and have it reformat the drive erasing anything on the drive. Then in my case you have to plug the external drive with all your music on it into the computer while leaving the new empty reformatted drive in the sony. So instead of the sony just reading the music that's on any old external drive you must run it through the computer and store it in a format nothing else can read, kinda annoying. Alas I have the computer and sony running Ethernet into the router today with the laptop plugged into power. It has been running about an hour and has transferred a total of 144 out of 17,817. I figure it will run for the next week lol.

[harri009]

The good thing is that once it's done I hopefully shouldn't have to do it again. There is one sentence in the manual thought that kinda makes me laugh. "Due to the nature of the hard disk drive, we do not recommend you store
data on the hard disk drive for a long period." I wonder what a long period is

[jdandy]

Jeff.......Sony has always been a company with proprietary ways of doing things that were unique to them and only supported by them. A good example, when all other computer manufacturers were providing compact flash memory card readers in their laptops, Sony was providing Memory Stick readers in their laptops to drive their customers to purchase a Sony Memory Stick. I am not surprised the HAPZ1 wont read an external hard drive not formatted by it.