SEPTEMBER 2004 MA XIMUMPC 4
We road test seven new
MP3 players to find out!
We road test seven new We road test seven new We road test seven new We road test seven new We road test seven new
T
he iPod has become as synony-
mous with MP3 players as Kleenex
with facial tissue, Coke with soda,
Mao with Communism. But there are
more flavors of Communism than just
the Chairman’s, more brands of soda
pop than just Coke, and a hell of a lot
more MP3 players out there than just
the iPod and the iPod Mini. Some are
hard drive-based, some are flash-mem-
ory based, and all of them offer some-
thing different from you-know-what in
terms of form and function.
It’s worth mentioning that these
days the iPod (as well as the iPod Mini)
looks pretty uptight on the format
side. It supports only the MP3 and AAC
codecs, to the exclusion of alternatives
such as the royalty-free, open-source
OGG and, of course, Microsoft’s WMA.
As PC fanatics, we prefer to make our
own decisions about what formats we
listen to and how we listen to them.
That’s exactly what the players in this
roundup have to offer.
Although we’ve yet to see an inter-
face innovation from a PC-centric man-
ufacturer on the level of Apple’s iPod,
we were pleased to discover that the
level of sophistication in today’s play-
ers is rising along with their capacities.
All the players in this roundup, for
example, support variable bitrate files,
and only one neglected to use our ID3
tags for identification.And that’s just the beginning.
Support for lossless compression and
the open-source codec OGG is growing,
and features like parametric equalization
and unrestricted network support may
eventually be enough to tarnish the var-
nish of Apple’s fancy-pants players.
One thing that hasn’t changed, how-
ever, is the horrible quality of even the
fanciest bundled earbuds. We recom-
mend you toss yours out immediately;
all these players were tested with
Shure’s E3c earbuds ($130, http://www.shure.
com ). Now let’s find out whether any of
these MP3 players has what it takes to
dethrone the mighty (or Mini) iPod.
—BY LOGAN DECKER