Portable Music Players: My Verdict on Your Best Choice Today
Mar 16 '02
The Bottom Line You have several choices out there when it comes to portablizing your music. One choice seems to resonate with the future, and is increasingly affordable.
What should you get as a portable music player?
In the Spring of 2002, the choices are still a bit ambiguous, but I think the media of choice is becoming increasingly clear.
In my life I have seen music stored on vinyl 45s and LPs, 8-track tapes, cassette tapes, compact disks (CDs), MDs, and now digitally in MP3 form. So I've seen (and heard) a lot in my 50+ years.
But put all that experience aside, and let me tell you something else- I am not an infallible authority here. Back 20 years ago in 1982 I thought the videotape revolution was going to go with Sony, so I bought a really nice Betamax recorder player and a really nice Betamax camcorder and settled back to take the future by storm. Of course, the future went the other way- to VHS- and eventually I surrendered, buying a VHS unit and converting all my Betamax tapes over to now-even-more-grainier VHS copies. My Betamax stuff now serves as a filler-upper in the bottom of a box because I know I should discard it but I am sure any day now the Smithsonian Institution is going to call me with a high-dollar offer to put it in their Museum of Obsolete Electronic Devices so I'm hanging on to it. Just factor all that into what I am going to tell you next.
From the evolution of portable electronic sound media, many years ago Sony came out with a device called the Walkman.
Up until then people had "portable" cassette players which were battery powered and which could play music and other sounds, but they were the size of a shoebox and weighed in at 4-5 pounds. Not what you'd want to lug around on a 10K jog through your local park. Enter Sony's Walkman.
The Walkman was great in that you could play prerecored tapes on a lightweight device, with earphones, and it weighed about as much as a couple of magazines. It had earphones with GREAT sound so that you could listen to YOUR music in PRIVATE without anyone else complaining and the sound reproduction was great. That began a technological revolution called Truly Portable Audio Devices.
So today we have essentially four formats to choose from: cassettes, CDs, MDs, and MP3s.
Not long back I read a review recommending that buyers stick with CD players in this area for the future. While that might have had some advantages at the time, I personally think that time has come and gone. This is predicated, of course, on the fact that the average consumer is willing to spend up to $300.00 to get a really nice portable sound system. If that's too expensive for your blood yet, stick with a CD player or the interesting hybrid, the CD/MP3 player. But if, over time, you can save up the $300.00, read on.
Here's what I think of cassettes. I have a HUGE collection of cassette tapes, and I play them a lot. But I play them in my car on long trips. But guess what? The kind of cassettes I normally play are not the music kind; they are the books-on-tape I listen to because in my life I stay so busy I hardly have time to read a good book anymore; I'd rather listen to it read as I drive. But since digital-quality music has outsrtipped cassette music, that leaves cassettes out of the running. I say all this with the knowledge that many of my friends who live all over the world today can only still use cassette technology when it comes to music. That will change. Hey, I still have many, many music cassettes that I'm hanging onto until some bright engineer convinces the people in marketing that there is a market for some strange audiophiles out here that actually would like to convert our tape songs into WAVs or MP3s.
MDs? These are a "betamax" of the current age, I am afraid. It's a shame because they are excellent. Thousands of radio stations rely on them. I have a few lying around from when I once worked with a radio station on some stuff. Many consumers do too. But I don't think they will ever capture the main market. They are a lot like Betamax and Apple Computers: kewl but basically runner-up material.
CDs? I have a lot of CDs and a portable CD player I still occasionally use. It is a great device. But I fear even its days are limited. Why? Well, it only holds about an hour's worth of songs on one CD, so for a day's worth of music, that means you need at least 24 CDs. They must be stored. I keep mine in a CASE LOGIC zippered storage notbook- no problem really, except that you have to keep up with them and store the storage case somewhere where no cretin will steal it and where you can remember to find it. Another problem with CDs is that they scratch easy and if that happens your precious music is no more. You have to keep the laser in the CD player clean too, or the CDs won't play. So what's better, and affordable?
Enter the 20 Gigabyte MP3 Jukebox (like the one sold by Creative Labs) that sells today for about $300.00. You get the potential of 14 days of music stored on it.
That's like having at least 300 CDs all in one small player about the size of a portable CD player. But with no scratches on the CDs though- always crystal/digitally clear. No storage hassles or worries about theft or misplacement. No cleaning disks to clean the laser. Just on-and-off. Fourteen days of music. Your whole collection. Bingo.
And on the horizon: 100 Gigabyte MP3 Players. 70 days of continuous, unskipping, inscratched music in the palm of your hand. Sounds unreal? It's just around the corner, dear friends. Smile.
The drawback, to me with MP3s, though, up till now has been that it is difficult to pull the MP3s OFF the Jukebox and store them somewhere if you need the space on the Jukebox for other MP3s. IOMEGA has a product which may be just the lifesaver you need. You can get an IOMEGA Peerless 20 Gigabyte storage unit for about $300.00 these days (works great), and you can database all your MP3s on the 20 GB cartridges (any 100 GB cartridges coming to the Peerless in the future , IOMEGA?- you did it with the ZIP drive like that.) Or you can use your computer's big hard disk as your MP3 database "bank". Just remember to always DOWNLOAD from it and never erase the "original" master copies. That way you never worry about uploading from the Jukebox or losing any music; if you want it back ON the Jukebox just go back and download it onto the Jukebox from the data bank.
There is a workaround in there somewhere.
The prices on these things continue to drop, the reliability continues to get better, and the user-friendliness of the control procedures continues to get easier. So a high-storage MP3 player seems to me to be the portable music unit of choice today, especially if you couple it with an MP3 database/storage module like the Peerless or a big Hard Disk.
What's next in this arena, you ask? Well, it's only a matter of time before some company like M*cr*s*ft floats an ad before your eyes that says STORE YOUR ENTIRE MUSIC COLLECTION, UP TO A YEAR'S CONTINUOUS MUSIC, ON OUR SERVER WHICH WILL CONNECT WIRELESSLY TO YOUR PORTABLE RECEIVER ANYWHERE! THINK OF IT AS WORLDWIDE CABLE TV- WITH WIRELESS RADIO CONNECTIONS INSTEAD OF CABLES- FOR YOUR EARS! ONLY $250.00 PER MONTH! The advantages of this hypothetical satellite-delivered service will be: (a) HUGELY increased storage, (b) you can access your music anytime, anywhere, and (c) no worries about theft- the music is stored in the sky (not really)- if your receiver gets swiped just get a new one and log back into your music.
Let's say you are rich enough to pay out $3,000.00 a year every year for your music that way. Do you really want other people who can read your personal music library's titles somewhere to know that you like that sexy old song by the Divinyls or Nine Inch Nails or Perry Como? Most people I know want to keep their music PRIVATE, andTHEIRS, right by their side, and not have it "serviced" by some faceless megacorporation and whatever gnomes might be looking at your preferences in music or to see if it meets all the fine-print copyright provisions that the FCC, the FBI, the PTA, and the ABC have dreamed up in their infinite governmental bureaucratic wisdom.
On the other hand, if I was, say, climbing the mountain K2 in the Himalayas some bright morning and I was just about to reach the summit, it would be nice to switch on my lightweight Walkman-sized MP3 satellite reciever and listen from my personal music collection to George Harrison's old Beatles song "Here Comes The Sun" as I climbed those final 10 feet snowy to the top in the bright sunshine. A rich experience can be made even richer by music, and having our music with us whether we were climbing K2 or plowing through papers at the office or digging a ditch through the farmland or laying in our bed someday in the Seychelles Islands listening to the song that you and your lover consider your favorite song together--there is an appeal in that for the satellite music service sure to come.
So if the price and privacy issues ever get resolved to your satisfaction, maybe this will catch on. But I suspect that most of us hard-core audiophiles are still going to want to keep our music connection private and exclusive-- when that day of wireless music collections arrives.
No doubt there is some creative person in R*dm*nd or some other place saying "Skeptic!" as he reads this. Tough.
So go with the Jukebox. You will not only Rock Around the Clock; you will Rock Around The Calendar. And then some. That's my take on this subject, circa Spring, 2002.
Then again, remember- I'm the guy who bought the Betamax...
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Ed.Williamson
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Member: Ed Williamson
Location: Way Out West, USA
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Fight 'em till Hell freezes over, then fight 'em on the ice!
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