MP3 Players??

L6steel

L6steel

Joined
Sep 23, 1999
Messages
5,855
Well, the prices are finally low enough that I've decided to get myself an MP3 player. I was checkin em out at Walmart today and they had several brands and I don't have a clue which one to get so I thought I'd ask you guys about it before I flopped down the cash.
Anyone have any good or bad experiences with these brands of MP3 players?
Rio
Philips
Sony
RCA Lyra
Sure appreciate anything you can tell you me about em!!
Oh yeah, is there any type of accessory that allows you to hook an MP3 player up to your car stereo?
Take care peoples!
Michael
 
Off to Gadgets & Gear.
 
I don't have hands-on experience, Michael, but I was investigating one as a birthday present for my wife. My choice was going to be the Rio Nitrus, primarily because it had by far the most memory bang for the buck (1.5 gb for $150 at Wal-Mart). That is a great deal. All the reviews I saw were very positive and the included software is supposed to be excellent. Also comes with Sennheiser earbuds and has a pretty long runtime. Only negative is no fm tuner if that is an issue for you. I definitely thought it was the best choice unless you were looking to double your investment and get into the i-pod catagory.

Jack
 
I have never tried one myself, but IPods are supposed to be just about the best MP3 players available. If you have the money to spend on one I doubt you would be dissapointed, from what I have heard anyway.

I have an RCA Lyra, and am happy with it. I get good runtime for the single AAA battery, and it can hold a lot of music. It is different from many of the other players in that it has internal memory but also accepts Security Digital cards to expand this memeory. At the moment the largest you can go is a 512MB chip, but it is plenty. You can have a few cards with different music on them and swap them out as wanted to always have something new.
 
There are reasonably cheap adapters for audio to cassette which work for most cars and most portable players:

http://www.digitalfotoclub.com/sc/product-features.asp?id=964591970

As for the player itself, it would help if you listed your requirements.

How much music do you intend to carry?
How long does the battery life need to be?
Does it need to be shockproof/shock resistant (for jogging)?
Colour?
Software important (some mp3 players are treated like external hard disks, you can just dump stuff on them with windows explorer)?
PC specs?
Price range?
Do you have good headphones of your own (some players are good but come with sub-standard headphones or uncomfortable ones)?
Size?

You get the idea :D
 
Have you considered a Mini-disc player instead? I had been looking for an MP3 player and settled instead on Mini-disc. A couple of reasons why:

1) With the encoding used you can store a heck of a lot of music on a disc, 5 hours or so per disc. And you have an infinite amount of storage.

2) I can get a brand new Sony MD with all the car accessories and everything I need for 99 bucks at Best Buy, plus 15 bucks for 10 80 min mini-discs

3) Better sounds quality is acheivable

There are some draw backs, Sony is the company that invented the discs and encoding and as you know they are "in bed" with the RIAA. So the NetMD software is kind of limiting and has an imposed limit of the number of copies you can make of a file...but it's pretty easy to get around that. Anyway, long story short, it's cheaper and you can get a ton of storage and it's just pretty cool. :)

Something to think about

Jared
 
You can get an IPod with 40 GB of space for music, that is a heck of a lot of space to fill up. I guess it really depends on how much music you have, and want to have with you. With an MP3 player like a IPod you can carry just about all of your music around with you, and not have to worry about finding MD's or carrying around a bunch of MD's to have a selection of music with you. I guess this really depends on what you want it for, and how you normally travel around. I got an MP3 player to have some music with me while I am between classes, usually about an hour, and like not having to think about discs. I just toss the MP3 in my pocket, and am ready with a decent assortment of music. On My RCA player with 64Mb internal + 128Mb SD card I am able to fit about 100 songs. More than enough for my needs for a week.

As for sound quality, well that is a personal question. The MP3 format is in no way designed for sound quality, as it works on the premis that it is ok to remove certain things from the music in order to make it a smaller file. IS this such a horrible thing? Well yes and no, it really depends on what you are looking for. If you just want some music for the background while doing something else then I find that MP3 works great. It allows you to have a lot of music without having to worry about changing discs. Another thing to consider is the quality that your equipment will be able to reproduce for you. If you just have a cheaper set of headphones and a cheap portable CD player I would bet you wouldn't notice the difference between a decent MP3 and the CD. BTW, most MP3 players will also play other music formats, such as WAV or WMA, which could be of higher quality.

Personally I wouldn't bother with MD as it seems to not be such a popular format as it is stuck somewhere between MP3 and CD. If you want high quality the choice is CD. If you want portability the choice is MP3. MD sits in the middle of the road offering decen quality and decent portability.

Of course the biggest reason that MP3 is so popular is that it is possible to get just about anything for free on the internet. Might not be legal, but it is possible, and the lure of a free lunch is hard to resist. Especially when a CD can cost $20, and you might only want one or two songs on it. Or going the legal route there are plenty of pay sites where you can download the music you want at a price lower than buying all the CD's.
 
RCA Lyra when i was on holiday in canada i bought that MP3, it's lasted 2 months when i got back home and saw the european market that just took off. first things first, do not but a mini-disk, that is soon be be completly erradicated. I have since sold my RCA and bought my IPOD. compare rca 20songs to ipod with 2,500. not to mention playlists etc on itunes.


On My RCA player with 64Mb internal + 128Mb SD card I am able to fit about 100 songs. More than enough for my needs for a week.
Click to expand...
I though that at the start to...rust me your following the same path as me, better to spend a extra hundred or so for ipod, you'll just lose money buying RCA b4 you get ipod. P.S RCA etc says u get more songs that what they say, you only get about 2/3 as mp3 larger format than wma unless you get converter to change formats. so you'll prob only get 60-80 songs MAX!


type of accessory that allows you to hook an MP3 player up to your car stereo?
Click to expand...
ipod has this. (bought seperatly)
 
All depends on how much you want to spend, how many MP3s you want to carry around with you and if sound quality/customizability is important to you.

I have a Zen 2.0 (20Gb) and use it every day for about 8hrs straight at work. The sound is good, usability is good and seems very durable. There were some small issues with the NX and the headphone plug but they seem to be fixed. If I was to buy one today, I'd go for one of the new IRiver harddrive players or a Rio Karma. Both have excellent sound, decent usability and have recieved good reviews. The Karma also has an ethernet connection on the cradle to network it to your home net.

Of the sub-1Gb models and the CD based MP3 players, I'd go with Iriver or Creative's Muvo line.

Check out the portable section of the forums on Head-Fi . They're generally audio nuts and the threads on there should give you a good idea of what they think of the units.
 
myopicmouse:

Why do you say the MD format is disappearing? What information is that based on?


ErikD:

I agree that 40 Gb is a heck of a lot of space, but for nearly 5X the price of my mini-disc player(not counting the cost of piece that the MD already comes with) it's hardly worth it, especially since I don't HAVE 40 gig worth of music to begin with. Of course as you've kind of pointed out, how often would you go somewhere that 5 hours of music playing randomly wouldn't be enough? I think after a certain point the idea of deminishing returns comes into play. I can't imagine a situation where I would be bored with 5 hours worth of various songs. The only situation I can think of would be a road trip, in which case I'd hardly mine toting around a few extra MD's. Storage capacity diminishes as an argument, in my mind, after a certain point.


You are right, sound quality is highly subjective. However, if you listen to an MP3 and a CD at the same time, anyone will tell a difference. With MD you are not somewhere in between MP3 and CD you are at CD quality, depending on the original source, in a MUCH more manageable size and a heck of a lot more storage capacity. It's a win-win in my opinion. :)

As for the MD format being unpopular, you are partly right. It's not super popular in the US, although the new Hi-MD 1gig disks with 10+ hours of storage may change that. But it is very popular, I've heard it's even more popular than MP3, in Japan. It's not going away anytime soon that's for sure.

Anyway, I would never say MD is superior to MP3 type players, but to discredit MD is short sighted I think. It's features and abilities as a platform easily place it on the same level as MP3 and in some case a little bit ahead. IMO.




Jared
 
You see its 40GB of SPACE. Not 40GB of music. You can put your other files on it too (movies, pictures, work, games...). Sony decided that they didn't want people doing that with mini-discs. The price of MDs in the UK are ridiculously high, as are the players. The format is used mainly be musicians (bizarely people doing music exams in the UK are Required to record their compositions in MD format. And are practically forced to learn MS office for their computing/ICT/key skills exams...) iPods go hand in hand with the iTunes service which is popularising legal music downloading which I see as a good thing.

Pick your political affiliation and look at your needs.
 
Why do you say the MD format is disappearing? What information is that based on?
Click to expand...

of course, it's over proce...and who wants to be carrying extra MDs, no it will soon vanish, the ipod shall march on.
 
I think we need to know your price range.
Do you want a hard drive player or a flash player?

I will assume hard drive player.

The best bang for your buck will be a Creative Zen player, but it isn't as small as the other players.
The Dell DJ is also cheap, but it just looks so dull and boring...

Iriver and Ipod are the most expensive players. The Iriver has the most features (radio, optical out, no software required for transfer), Ipod is easiest to use. And it's sexy.

Rio Karma has a smaller form factor and it is usually cheaper than both Iriver and Ipod. It has a dock with RCA output so you can easily hook it up to an amp that takes analog input. If you get one be sure to get one at a brick and mortar store because there are some quality control issues. It is a good player though.

Sound quality is generally good for everything listed above.

Generally, RCA, Phillips are not rated highly. The new Sony hard drive player is a waste because it only plays atrac, so you have to reconvert any mp3's you have.

As for minidisc and Hi-MD.. I have 5 gigs of Rock music alone, do you think I want to carry 5 discs just to have a selection of Rock to listen to?
The point of a hard drive player is much like that of a buffet - you can choose anything from your ENTIRE music library to listen to!

They are really fun devices to have. Just remember to get some decent headphones (I would recommend Grado Sr-60's or Koss Portapros for open headphones, Sony V6/V7056 (NOT V600!!!!) for closed headphones).

Good luck in your search!

(by the way, I use an Iriver IHP-120 and love it. I bought it because I wanted to have radio just in case I got bored with my music)
 
Daggum guys, I'm more confused now than I was before, lol!
I guess which mp3 player to buy is like every thing else, everyone has a different opinion.
As far as price range, as cheap as I can keep it!
Thanks guys!!!
 
That's why I suggested the Nitrus, Michael. Clearly there are people on here who know more about this than I do, but you will probably spend 100-130 bucks for something in the 128-256k storage range. For $150 you can have 1.5gb. That's a lot of music for casual listening. Better then average earphones, usb2 for faster downloads, reportedly very good software, and long play time on the (I think) rechargeable batteries. I'm just spouting most of this from memory, but you will have to go at least $100 more to get more memory. It may not be worth it for what you will use it for. Anyway, I'm not the final authority on this, but check out the reviews.

Jack
 
Jared,

The whole point of having 40GB, or any other large amount of music with you isn't that you would need to listen to it all at once, or even could. It is that you can carry around practically every song you might like, and listen to it when you feel like it. You don't have to worry about carrying around a bunch of discs to have everything you might be in the mood for. Just pickup an MP3 player and you are set.

I agree 100% that the difference between CD and MP3 is noticable, or at least when the MP3 has ever been compressed. I would tend to think, though have never tried this myself, that if you were to copy a song from a CD to the highest quality MP3 not much would be lost. As for MD I have never listened to them, so I can't really comment fairly. I do however feel that if you are able to fit more music onto that disc something must be getting lost quality wise along the way. Maybe nothing very noticable, or maybe not much at all, I can't say. All I know is that I wouldn't invest any money in an MD player as I feel that MP3 will be putting an end to them. They made a lot of noise when they first came out, and were hot for a while, but not so much recently.

myopicmouse,

I am stating these numbers from what I actually had on there, roughly speaking, before I took out the SD flash card to put into a digital camera. As for the convertor I am not really sure what you mean. Even Windows Media Player is capable of putting a song from CD or any other source onto an MP3 player, and change it to whatever bitrate you want. For my needs I am perfectly happy with my Lyra. I was basically looking for the same thing as Michael, something as cheap as possible. I just wanted to be able to listen to some music while in the library between classes. It just so happened that we sell these where I work, so I got a good discount and was able to get the player, a better set of phones, and the 128 MB flash memory for $100. I am perfectly happy with my decision.

Michael,

If you are at all interested in a Lyra let me know, I think we might have one left. If you would be interested I can check and see if I could get you a better price than at Walmart.
 
Mini disk have been around for quitre a while and have never really caught on. They do have some nice features and advantages but they have never really gained popularity. The only reason they are still out there is that Sony is large enough to float a product that is not muchj of a success and a big income maker for them.
 
Sorry if I'm hijacking the thread here L6, to the point, my advice is get what you want... :)

madhaha:

These are valid points, I don't know the market in the UK it may very well be poorly marketed there...that doesn't mean it's not a viable format or a good deal in the places where it's not overpriced.

myopicmouse:

Read my reply to madhaha, it could be that in the UK market they really dropped the ball with MD. And it could be that in the UK MD is going to "disappear". However to make a blanket statement like that based on your limited experience doesn't make it true world wide.

ayoungman:

1 Gb disc size does not mean 1 Gb of music. The music is coverted to a different format and uses a different compression. The amount of music you can store on a 1 gig Hi-MD is significantly more than on a 1 gig flash device using standard MP-3 compression. If interested, here is some more information Hi MD . The idea is that for your 5 gig of music you wouldn't need 5 discs.

ErikD:

I guess this is just were users are different. If I'm listening to something all day I can listen to 5 hours worth of music and not get bored and need to search for something else to fit my mood. That's me though, that may not be you. I just pick up my md player and I'm set. Plus I don't think you can over look the value of MD, here in the US they are VERY affordable and provide a TON of storage. You are right, the files ARE compressed, and of course there will be some loss in quality. However it's not as significant of a loss as CD to MP3.


As to the idea that MD is not popular, you are right it's not super popular here in the US, this is mainly due to Sony and the way they released it(the format and media were proprietary), however the popularity (and this is all anecdotal I've never been there) in Japan is pretty amazing. From what I've heard it's taken a hold there and is not going away soon. I believe that with the release of Hi-MD it's popularity will greatly increase here as well.


I'm REALLY not some sort of minidisc zealot I promise! :D I think it's just a great affordable alternative to flash and harddrive players.


Jared
 
I'm looking at the Hi-MD stuff now, and I must say I like what I see. Yeah it's great to have 4gb for an ipod mini or 15+ gig for an ipod, but the Hi-MD just looks like a cool technology, and 1gb discs are more than enough to tide me over for any given *day*. I will be getting a $50 gift certificate from Amazon.com sometime in September, will see if the prices go down a bit by then.

I get student discount on Apple stuff like ipods but I just never really thought of an ipod as that useful. Music is fine and good, but it's hard to justify the $225+ for something that is pretty much exclusively for music.

Proprietary technology or not, I think it's cool, and I will probably support it to some extent.
 
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