Car, Office, anywhere MP3
Written: Dec 03 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, Long Battery Life
Cons: Flash is more shock resistant, software is weak, USB 1.1
The Bottom Line: Excellent value for price. Under half the price of Ipod.
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| silflayhraka's Full Review: e.Digital Treo 15 MP3 Player |
Flash-based MP3 players have their problems: short memory, short battery life, and high cost. Despite great reductions in Flash prices, most MP3 players with rechargeable batteries and 128MB or more of memory hover in the $200-$300 range, despite 256MB of CompactFlash costing only $80 or so, and 32MB MP3 players retailing at $30 or less would make you think $110 should fetch a 256MB MP3 player, right? Unfortunately, not so. CD-MP3 has its own issues, common complaints being slow performance on low-end models (10-15 second pauses between songs), poor menus, or lack of MP3/WMA dual format support, backlighting, etc. My Rio 500 (courtesy of Audible.com) eats a couple of batteries a day and holds 192MB expanded, limiting play to a short few hours. In lieue of dedicated players, often a more economically sensible alternative would be a PocketPC with expansion memory - a lot more powerful than a Creative Nomad for about the same price. But even then, Flash beyond 256MB enters price beyond reason for me, even with a 1GB Microdrive.
Enter the notebook hard drive-based MP3/WMA player. The e.Digital Treo 15 packs 15GB of hard disk space for well under $200. The Lithium rechargeable cell will last for two whole days of continous play (8 hour work days, that is. e.Digital claims a modest 10 hours on their website). The file being played is cached in memory so the drive is on very little of the time. The Treo features a good (though not excellent contrast) LCD screen featuring 16 characters x 8 lines text with backlight. This is far ahead of most CD-MP3 players I've seen, perhaps not as handsome as the Rio 500. Still, it works, and a better screen just means it will cost more. I personally don't find that I need to look at the screen much anyway. I mean, really, the whole point to MP3 is that you don't have to keep the BAD songs you would ordinarily skip, right? So if you do anything other than hit "play" when you turn it on, you're doing something wrong, eh? (grin)
Audio quality is good, I won't try to guess any SNR numbers, as they would depend on your bitrate, quality of rip, and where you are using it, as well as your IQ, your ego, and your taste in music. Here's a trick question: what's the SNR of a perfectly clean-sounding stereo capable of producing 100dB, while operating at full volume in a quiet car?
Answer: about 50dB. A quiet car is about 50dB. 100 dB over 50 dB of noise leaves you only 50 dB of non-noise.
Here's some other interesting trivia: sound at 155dB will burn your skin, sound at 180dB will kill you. Noise level in a private office: 41 dB.
Enough of my audiophile rant, I love to stir angst amongst audiogeeks. One big plus for this player for me was the WMA capability. My experience with low bitrate MP3 is poor. Despite my rant earlier about SNR, I will say that MP3, when the bit rate is too low, does tend to take on characteristics that I imagine as the sound of a cat romancing a hamster. Not pretty. WMA capability promises to make 96kbit rates sound as good as MP3 at 128kbps or higher, which means a considerable space savings without compromising audible performance. 96kbps on MP3 did not impress me on the RIO. 128kbps I consider minimum for MP3, 160 is what I personally rip at, and 192kbps is super. Anything more and I have to ask what the point of converting to MP3 is. After all, Maxtor's new 250GB drive holds over 400 typical CD's WITHOUT compression.... the CD-MP3 players left me choosing whether I wanted a slow, limited MP3/WMA player or a more feature-rich MP3-only player at double the price, or the have-it-all non-option of a CD-MP3 player costing more than the Treo. Treo beat them, as it does both MP3 and WMA.
The driver support is rather limited, only accessible via the program that is included. You can also store files on the Treo, but they are only accessible using this software, not as a USB disk drive as your might expect. It is easy to use, just drag files/folders from a Windows explorer to the folders in the program. I have experienced the occasional disconnect while copying files, but that just as easily could have been caused by my PC rather than the Treo. The power button may seem a little tricky, but just be sure to press it firmly for about a second, as a quick press for some reason makes it briefly flash on then off.
As a hard disk, shock vulnerability may result it damage, so it probably isn't something to jog with, but for listing to music at work or in the car, it beats anything else. And with workplaces increasingly banning MP3 on corporate computers due to copyright liability, it may be a necessity!
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
silflayhraka
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Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 1 member
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