Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30845 in Consumer Electronics
• Brand: Sony
• Model: NASE35HD.CEK
• Released on: 2008-03-10

Manufacturer's Description
Highly affordable audio system stores up to 15,000 music tracks on its 80GB hard disk.

Customer Reviews

Great system, but a bit of a nuissance to get all your music on
Sony NAS-EH35HD Giga Juke Hi-Fi system
Pros:

Great sound. I'm sure hifi-snobs will beg to differ, but if you're willing to listen to MP3s anyway than I guess you won't fall into that category.

Great looks - although finger prints show up easily on the shiny finish.

The system comes with a free TDM-IP10 Digital Media Port, to hook up your iPod. I've sold mine off on Amazon marketplace, which knocked 25 quid off the purchase price. (I've also noticed that sneaky Amazon has raised the price now ahead of the VAT cut).


Cons:

Yes it takes ages to upload songs onto the HDD. It is also preferable to do this with a usb stick rather than from the CD as this means it will be done in the bitrate that you've saved the file. Recording from CD the bitrate is set at 128kb, which in my opinion is a too low quality.

Getting the names right. Once it's on the HDD it does not allow you to change a band's name to one that already exists on the HDD. I also have to autotag all my MP3 tracks to make sure they appear right on the HDD.

There's no function that shows you how much space is left on the HDD.

The time it takes to start up the system (reading the HDD) takes longer the more music you upload.

You can change the display view, but everytime you switch it on it will revert back to the default display.

Although it sounds like there's a lot of cons, once you've uploaded most of your music these gripes will disappear. I decided to buy this system as I don't listen to my iPod anymore and was sick of continuously hooking it up to an inferior sounding speaker dock or listening on laptop speakers.

A great piece of Sony kit, once you get over a few snags!
I'm a Sony boy, so when I decided that I wanted a HDD music system, this was the obvious choice. I was looking for a decent HDD capacity, obviously a good sound, a DAB radio and a system that looks well in the living room.

This piece of kit delivers on all four of those, so it does the job, but its not all plain sailing. I've not explored the full features of this system yet so this is not a full review, but there's certainly a few things I think people need to consider before purchasing one.

Firstly, its quite expensive for what it is, although the price on Amazon at the time of writing this is £30 less than I paid and much more reasonable. You can get a hell of a lot of system for nigh on £300 these days, so its a major consideration. I went for the NAS-EH35HD mainly because of the Hard Drive as I buy my music online these days and wanted a system that could handle the music without burning CDs. If you don't need a HDD, it goes without saying, you can get much more for your money elsewhere.

I love the way I can plug in my Sony MP3 player via the USB connection (there's one front and back) and play tracks directly from the player through the system, all controlled by the remote. Very nifty. I believe this will also be the case for Ipod. You get an Ipod cradle and its built to work with one seamlessly.

The sound is fantastic, as I expected.

The main gripe I have with the system is the importing of music. If like me you store most of your music on your PC these days, you'd have thought putting music onto the NAS-EH35HD would be a simple case of connecting your PC to the system and copying the files. Nope. What you have to do, is first dump the music to be copied onto an MP3 player and then connect that to the system. You then essentially record the music to the HDD, although its faster than real time record. Its takes about 3 hours to copy 3.5 gigs worth of tunes. Although this isn't a showstopper, its annoying, especially when your MP3 player has a 4gb memory and you need to copy 20gig of music!

The second (and last) issue I had was the way it actually stored the MP3s. I guess MP3 players must have some software which keeps albums together and ensures that album tracks are stored and played in the order intended by the artist, but I don't think the system recogised whatever filing method used by the PC. So the album tracks were stored alphabetically rather than track number, and also tracks from compilation albums are stored as single tracks (as the artist is always different). There are ways to overcome this however (I simply numbered the tracks of albums, and changed the artists on compilations to "various", but novices might have a few teething probs).

Finally, if you're looking to connect your TV to your system, I dont think this one is for you. Sony's next level up "Gigajuke" has HDMI connectivity so go for that one.

Overall, once the tracks are copied, and in the right way, this is a belting piece of kit and will be even better when the price comes down.

Sony Gigajuke
Bought the Gigajuke so that I can clear my computer of songs to free up disc space. The sound is great and once you work out how the system works its easy.
It takes a while to upload from Cds. New Cds arn't recognized. When this happens I just look in my itunes library then transfer them to a usb stick then upload them to the HDD. It will recognize the track titles and the artist you only have to but in the album details.The ipod dock is great so if there are a number of persons in your house who have all got different tastes in music this system ticks all the boxes.
I have had a problem importing album information from Gracenote through my USB stick. So I will always download my new Cds to itunes then transfer to the HDD via USB stick.
The system is not as user friendly as the ipod you cannot play all tracks from one artist or look for genres. But all things considered a good system and well worth the money.
Ignore the 1 star I gave it 4 stars.