J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

Time for a new MP3 player, I have an old Iriver H340 which has given sterling service but at 40 gb everything doesnt fit any more and I cant be arsed bringing it back from work where it lives to move stuff on and off so I will stick the Iriver on Ebay and put some money to to get a new one, the Ipod Classic 160 was favourite but I prefer not to do the Itunes thing and there are a lot of reports of slowdown and glitches.

I have an Ipod touch at home and love it but dont really want to spend the £300 for the modest increase in capacity of another 24 gb, so what else is there, anyone had an Archos ?

Its basically just to sit on my desk at work so it doesnt need to be tiny but needs decent capacity and preferably under £200.

Jamz3k

i had an Iriver H140 and i really do miss it. Using an Ipod now and it really is an inferior product. I miss having good sound quality on the move.

what would scooby do

I have an archos 5 and I use FLAC format files. Amazing quality - makes ipoo's sound like a gramophone

I've always used creative labs products for sound quality but the archos is even better + it does video, records from sky tv etc etc. Oh and they browse the web with wifi.

So yeah they are not bad!

SunnySideUp

iPODs are very poor sound quality, but they do much more ..... depends what you want, gadget/gizzmo or serious music player.

If serious about music, go SONY or COWAN.

dpb

That archos looks like a miniture tv ! - and one review i saw said the 'classic' had better sound quality

G00ner

The thing about iPods are all the nice docks etc that you can get for them, no other brand has the same connectivity options.

I really didn't want to follow the crowd and buy an iPod, but I did a year or two ago and now have a 120gig Classic for the car, works perfectly with my Pioneer head unit and I have full control via the touchscreen satnav and then I have a 32gig Touch sat in a Denon docking station that has Dab/FM/Ethernet/CD/WiFi at home.

dpb

Well you jus need a foot length of wire connection with the others , dont you ?

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

The market is Ipod-centric and the docks charge and transfer data and all sorts,

Its looking like a Archos 5, its for my desk at work and for taking on hols, its the only thing that seems to match or beat the touch in some areas.

dalmatian

Just bought an ipod classic 160gb and i've got to say its the best sounding MP3 player i've heard.
I've got an iphone which sounds crap and also a 20gb Creative Zen which is better but nowhere near as good as the classic.
I didn't want to go down the ipod route but the sound quality is much improved and you can connect it to anything.

Jamz3k

Apple could make the Ipod almost perfect just by letting you drag and drop files onto without the use of Itunes. I cannot get on with itunes at all.

JackClark

Jamz, dragging and dropping was all well and good when we used tiny storage devices, trying to keep track of 160gig worth of tunes and other media using just a directory structure is just not practical today. It's worth your while getting to know iTunes.

SunnySideUp

iTunes sucks ..... that is universally acknowledged.

Markus

Do you happen to have any links to back that statement up? I have read that the latest iPod Touch do have slightly lower sound quality, due to a different path from the DAC to the headphone jack, but the vast majority of people wouldn't notice the difference anyway, typically only audiophiles, plus it's said to be a warmer sound, which some prefer.

I will say that using the supplied earphones doesn't provide the best sound in the world, but that is down to the earphones and not the iPod itself. If you have a better pair of earphones then quality will be improved.

Poor sound could also be due to a low encoding rate of the music you are listening to. A track encoded at 28kbps will sound "worse" than one encoded at 128kbps. The same goes if you ripped a CD to mp3 and then convert it to mp4 or another format, some loss will occur. Again, this isn't really down to the iPod itself.


iTunes for the PC, I'll grant you that, is not well known for being the best bit of software out there. It has got better as the versions have progressed, but it's not as slick as the Mac version, and it's hardly surprising really, why would they have a better version on another operating system.

I've never really understood why people don't like iTunes. The PC version is a bit clunky, but it's essentially the same as the Mac version. I'm ignoring the obvious issue of it crashing and thus making it somewhat unusable. But when it does work, is it really that bad? Putting tracks on an iPod/iPhone can be automatic or manual. You drag the files from the Library to the Device. Isn't that drag and drop? Granted it's not the same as being able to do that in windows explorer.

If the argument is about not being able to copy music *from* the device to your computer, I'll agree, that's not ideal, but it's Apple's way of preventing the theft of music, and if they didn't do this then I'm sure that they would be pressured by the RIAA or other copyright bodies to have some form of protection to prevent music being copied. I'm not sure what happens with other MP3 players though, I assume you can copy to and fro without a problem.