Mm
Its a little on the large size for a digital streamer though. when you can get a good streamer with a hard drive in box the size of a guitar stompbox, this looks like an oversized retro thing really. Boxy, pandering to the aesthetics of people with a thing for old skool hifi. That screen is too small to the point of being mean and useless across a room. The box design dictates a particular way of interacting with the unit, with a front and back horizontal only placement, so if you stand over it, the screen is not ideally placed, and the display is quite hard to read at a distance of a foot away with two foot looking down -- so it needs to be placed high... Feels like a hifi component from 1970, in design terms a retrograde step especially in terms of usability user interface redundancy... Front panel and a tablet app and a remote... and am sure its a lovely sounding unit anything costing more than £100 these days is lovely sounding but its unimaginative design is a 'retro statement' rather than any real involvement I with addressing what a user interface for a device like this should be... Its shape is not dictated by anything other than simple unimaginative mess, materially it's a cop out. Price wise £2k I had expected some effort in almost every area of attention to detail rather than retro cool. Materially, colour, interface, positionality, conceptually no problem with local store but it has redundancy in key areas it does not need.
Something Sony always seems to mis gauge perhaps here it is intentional, to appeal to a cross section of the community that wants to have their stuff on show and is impressed by weighty boxes and machines slabs of metal.
I expected better.
I was in the market for this and felt let down.
I am off to hear one later in store, but as I have a NAS and any device like this is intended for life in a machine cupboard in a hallway, in another room Its looks and user interface is wasted. ideal for retro inspired types hut it feels like it lacks innovation, it looks like its a bait and switch to get people buying products based on the battle-proof sony build history of the 1970s when that past is behind them.
Its a little on the large size for a digital streamer though. when you can get a good streamer with a hard drive in box the size of a guitar stompbox, this looks like an oversized retro thing really. Boxy, pandering to the aesthetics of people with a thing for old skool hifi. That screen is too small to the point of being mean and useless across a room. The box design dictates a particular way of interacting with the unit, with a front and back horizontal only placement, so if you stand over it, the screen is not ideally placed, and the display is quite hard to read at a distance of a foot away with two foot looking down -- so it needs to be placed high... Feels like a hifi component from 1970, in design terms a retrograde step especially in terms of usability user interface redundancy... Front panel and a tablet app and a remote... and am sure its a lovely sounding unit anything costing more than £100 these days is lovely sounding but its unimaginative design is a 'retro statement' rather than any real involvement I with addressing what a user interface for a device like this should be... Its shape is not dictated by anything other than simple unimaginative mess, materially it's a cop out. Price wise £2k I had expected some effort in almost every area of attention to detail rather than retro cool. Materially, colour, interface, positionality, conceptually no problem with local store but it has redundancy in key areas it does not need.
Something Sony always seems to mis gauge perhaps here it is intentional, to appeal to a cross section of the community that wants to have their stuff on show and is impressed by weighty boxes and machines slabs of metal.
I expected better.
I was in the market for this and felt let down.
I am off to hear one later in store, but as I have a NAS and any device like this is intended for life in a machine cupboard in a hallway, in another room Its looks and user interface is wasted. ideal for retro inspired types hut it feels like it lacks innovation, it looks like its a bait and switch to get people buying products based on the battle-proof sony build history of the 1970s when that past is behind them.
