Good ideas, bad implementation
Written: Jun 11 '04
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Pros: Very upgradeable, very modifiable, very cheap
Cons: very poorly built. Expect to fix it yourself.
The Bottom Line: You'll want to love it, but build quality issues will keep this a short affair.
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| seishino's Full Review: Archos Jukebox Studio (20GB) MP3 Player |
Having had a Jukebox Studio 20 for almost two years now, its quickly become a major portion of our lives. Sadly it's shoddy construction has become an issue now twice, and it is about to go back to Archos a third time.
Everyone knows why you would want one of these... It's a 20GB USB HDD / MP3 player, large enough to hold quite a few hours of music. It's also cheap, as low as 150 dollars these days. That's a lot of music for not a lot of buck. It also has an upgradeable Hard disk drive, and replacement firmware available free (google for "rockbox"). It uses standard AA NIMH rechargeable batteries, so you can upgrade the capacity if you want. All of this expandability has brought in the modding community, so if you want to add colored lights, modify the RAM, or improve the sound output, and aren't squeamish with a soldering iron, the instructions for how to do so are on the web.
Sadly, the player also has its share of shortcomings, mainly in the hardware build realm. The MOD for improving sound output, for example, involves fixing a mistake that Archos made when creating the Jukebox. That really sums up my experience with the Studio 20. We've had problems that have varied from as simple as bent battery contacts to as complicated as broken recharge functionality and USB segfaults. Archos' driver will crash my computer if plugged directly into any USB port, but works fine behind a hub. Weird. We've had the thing stop recharging batteries several times now, each time we had to deal with Archos friendly but generally incompetent tech support. Maybe I'm giving them too little credit, but twice now they've replaced the entire unit instead of fixing what was wrong, and twice now the replacement units have developed the same problems. Again, google for jukebox problems, and you will see that the general build quality for this unit is sorrowfully low. In Archos' defense, this was the first hard disk based MP3 player, but it hasn't aged well.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 200
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
seishino
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Reviews written: 1
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