Ahab1973's Full Review: SanDisk Sansa Clip (8 GB) MP3 Player
Introduction - When it comes to a portable music player, I don’t really expect a lot. At least I don't think I do. My journey in the (often frustrating) world of portable music began with a very basic Sony cassette Walkman in the late 80s. I simply expect good portability, good durability (my old cassette Walkman actually still works), good sound and good battery life.
I guess at this point, I should note that this is only the second MP3 player I've ever owned. My first was another Sandisk model. The e260. I was relatively pleased with it at first but it (unfortunately) failed in less than a year (despite never being misused or abused in any way). You can read all about that Here.
The Purchase - Recently, I was in Wal-Mart and I just happened to see this player for the low price of $49.99. Fifty bucks for an 8 gig player was just way too good to pass up so, after a momentary internal debate with that guy in there who hates it when he pays a lot for something that dies suddenly shortly thereafter, I snatched it (Figure of speech. It was actually locked in a cabinet. Is theft really that widespread now?).
What’s in the box? - Not much. There's the player itself, a seven inch USB cable, cheap, throwaway earbuds, a small software CD and a few pieces of paper documentation. Most of them warn you not to turn it up too loud. If you want a real owner’s manual, you’ll have to download it from Sandisk (And print it out if you prefer a hard copy).
Meet the product - The Sansa Clip itself is unbelievably (at least to me) compact. About the size of a small box of matches. I've been very tempted to buy an iPod Shuffle in the past (Because I loved the idea of having a small, ultraportable music collection) but the fact that it has no screen was always a big deal breaker for me. This little Sansa Clip fits easily in the palm of the hand, has 8 gigs of storage and a two-color (Blue and amber) OLED display. Impressive! It’s really unbelievable that Apple chose not to at least put a simple display on the Shuffle long ago. Well, they just may have to now in order to compete. After the success of the Sansa Clip, I think it’s gonna be pretty tough to sell even the smallest players without a display of some kind.
As long as we're talking about the display, I'll just say I find the colors very friendly and easy on the eyes. Within the menu system, you can adjust the brightness. I have mine set very low and it works just fine in the dark or indoors with normal lighting. Outdoors may be a bit of a problem. I can't say because I haven't actually had a reason to use it outside yet. I would just expect this type of display to be somewhat difficult to see outdoors because they usually are.
The information displayed is very basic. I've found myself getting a little irritated at times waiting for the name of a song that is playing to scroll around before the screen shuts off. But I'm very familiar with most of the music I have on mine so that's not really a big deal for me. If I was listening to a lot of music I was very unfamiliar with, it could be really annoying.
Getting up and running - Using this product is about as simple as it gets. You simply connect it to a USB port and it will show up in My Computer (If you use Windows. Not sure about Max and Linux although it is said to work nicely with them) along with the rest of your drives. You then open it, open the music folder and drag and drop your music there. The only requirement is that your files must be properly tagged or finding them when you wish to play them will be just about impossible. This player works by reading tags. Not folders or file names.
What I like -
1. The Clip supports at least one lossless format. With the latest firmware, it supports the FLAC format.
2. It also supports a decent range of other formats, such as uncompressed WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG and Audible. You can use it for podcasts and auidiobooks but I have not evaluated these features (I will update this review if I do in the future).
3. The sound quality is great for such a tiny little player. Many (Some of them genuine audiophiles) have raved about the sound quality of this player. Take their word over mine. I have a pretty good ear but I don’t have the experience with truly good equipment that I would need to qualify myself as any kind of authority on sound. I'll just say that it sounds really good to me using my old trusty Sennheiser HD497 headphones.
4. Obviously, as stated, the screen was a major selling point for me. I only need the most basic feedback from a device such as this and that’s exactly what the display on the clip gives me. The battery indicator has many more levels than I expected it to and seems reasonably accurate.
5. In the menu, it is possible to set the player to turn itself off after a period of time spent in pause mode. The shortest time is one minute and that’s where I’ve set mine.
I find that I often don’t pause it longer than a minute if I’m coming right back to the music and if I do, it’s easy enough to turn it back on. This feature is great for making the thing as worry-free to use as possible. You can pause it and go do what you need to do without worrying about the battery being dead next time you use it if you forget to shut it off. Wonderful feature and if it isn’t on every MP3 player, it should be.
6. The clip itself is obviously a major selling point with many people. It’s amazing how many places on your clothing this thing can be clipped to. Unfortunately, although the tension is pretty tight, the clip has no teeth and it can slip off rather easily if you’re not careful.
7. The Clip has a voice recorder and an FM radio built in. It was amazing enough to me with the larger Sansa player I had before. How they crammed all that into this tiny device boggles the mind. The sensitivity of the FM radio actually isn’t that great (In my opinion) and really depends on where you are and your headphones (the headphone cable doubles as the antenna) but I have tried both of these features and they do work amazingly well.
The voice recorder could almost qualify as a “Bond Gadget“. You can’t even see the pinhole (literally) for the microphone unless you look very carefully. The quality of the recordings isn’t really spectacular and the range of the microphone is probably very limited but they’re at least as good as the recordings I made with my first cassette recorder years ago.
8. Battery life and charging - Charging is pretty fast (about three hours) and the battery lasts a good while. Probably not nearly as long as that of larger and more expensive players but considering how small the battery must be for this player, it’s quite incredible. The shortest time you will probably get with a brand new, fully charged Clip is about 8 hours (Depending on a wide range of factors). Some people have reported getting as much as 17 hours on a charge with MP3 files at medium volume. At any rate, this is reasonable for an ultracompact portable.
9. The firmware is a breeze to update for those of us who aren’t quite up to snuff on all of our computer skills. You simply install the Sansa Updater on your computer and run it with the player connected when you wish to check for updates. If there’s an update available, you simply confirm that you wish to do it and it will do everything else on it’s own. It’s pretty hard to imagine it being much simpler. Although I gather there are other ways to do it that aren‘t terribly complicated.
10. Unlike the earlier Sansa player that I had, this one has a format command in the menu. It’s nice to be able to press one button and wipe out everything. This could be a con if you’re not careful. I’m pretty careful. I would rather have this feature than not.
11. Obviously, the 8 gigs of memory really sold me. I knew a lot of progress has been made lately in solid state memory but I was still stunned to see so much for such a low price.
12. You don't need any software to do the basics. Drag and drop simplicity.
What I don’t like -
Unfortunately, with the good, there always comes the bad and although it may seem harsh to be overly critical of such a triumph of engineering as this little player seems to be, there are some glaring imperfections and little nitpicky things that hold it back from it’s full potential.
1. Although the FLAC format is now supported, it isn’t fully supported. Unless my player is unique (And I don't think it is), if I compress my files to anything other than level 0 (This gives you the least amount of compression and largest file size with FLAC, in case you didn‘t know), I get “skipping” and stuttering during playback. Now this isn’t a complete disaster, as with FLAC, higher compression doesn’t save very much space (FLAC is all about quality, after all) but FLAC files are already quite large and you only have 8 gigs of space so if you want to use FLAC, everything counts.
Lossless compression (preferably with FLAC) is the holy grail amongst people who really care about sound quality. Sandisk appears to know this but they apparently didn‘t bother to really work the kinks out of their FLAC decoder before they sent it out? Really sloppy, even if they did go above and beyond the call of duty by giving us FLAC in the first place. If you’re going to do it at all, do it right. Hopefully, this will be addressed in one of the next firmware updates. It shouldn’t need to be but it would make me happy.
2. The OLED screen stays on (pointlessly) while the unit charges. I don’t know how long these screens last but it usually takes around 3 hours to get a full charge and I do this about 2 to 3 times a week (Sometimes more). That will rack up some (completely unnecessary) hours on the display rather quickly.
3. The included USB cable is only seven inches long. What were they thinking? My computer is under my desk. Until I get around to buying a longer cable, I’ll be crawling under my desk every time I need to charge this thing or put some songs on it. Even at a discount price, this level of cheapness is just inexcusable. As many features as you get for your money, to open the box and be greeted with a seven inch cable is just insulting. How much could a longer cable possibly cost them?
4. The battery is completely integrated. If you need to replace it, you’ll have a tough time. The player isn’t designed to be opened (although it can be, if you‘re lucky and you don't break anything) and the battery is soldered in. If the battery dies a premature death (and let‘s face it, batteries do that sometimes), you can either buy a new player or you can try and deal with Sandisk’s customer service, with all of the pitfalls and hassles that course of action almost certainly entails.
It would be nice if you could just pop the battery out, run to Radio Shack (or wherever) and buy a new one. I guess they were shooting for a disposable player here. Maybe that works for some people but I don’t throw even the paltry sum of $50 in the trash casually. It’s always painful. Sandisk’s earlier players had batteries that were (relatively) easy to replace. If they didn’t have much else to recommend them, at least you could say that you could replace the battery if you had to.
5. Owners of previous Sandisk Sansa players (including myself) have had numerous (serious) problems. Sandisk is relatively slow and (at times, appears to be) reluctant to work out firmware bugs, despite many customer complaints about exactly the same issues (Although they appear to be improving somewhat).
If you have a problem you’d like addressed in the next firmware, they may or may not be responsive even if you make your concerns known to the right people and it‘s a very well established bug. I realize that world class customer service is a lot to expect when you buy a $50 product that offers distinctly more than it’s closest competitor but it just leaves a bad impression of the company. It would be nice if you could buy these products with some level of confidence. So far, I've bought two Sandisk MP3 players and both of them had relatively obvious software glitches right out of the box (That's to say that I discovered the glitches within days of purchase).
6. The included earbuds (as usual with most MP3 players) are junk. If you want to unlock the sonic potential of this player, the first thing to do is to buy better headphones. Almost anything is better. Just don’t buy headphones that are power hungry or you’ll need an amp and that’ll be expensive. Enough said. This player seems to put out some decent volume but it's best suited to very sensitive headphones.
7. There’s no card slot on this player like there is with the larger players in the Sansa line (Although I don’t know where they would’ve put it) so there’s absolutely no room for expansion. Eight gigs is a lot of room on such a small player but that’s it. When it’s full, you’ll have to sacrifice something to fit more on there. You’ll either have to compress your files more or you’ll have to delete stuff.
When you’ve been there, you know how frustrating it is to have to give something up for the sake of quantity. My earlier Sansa was a 4 gig flash player so I became intimately familiar with having to make these painful compromises. I’m (more than) slightly OCD about having as much high quality stuff in one convenient package as humanly possible. With MP3, I won’t go below 160 and even that is really pushing me into territory I don’t like being in one bit on the quality. You wouldn’t notice the quality deficit on the included earbuds but you will notice on anything significantly better.
8. It’s a minor complaint but the “scroll wheel” on this player actually isn’t a scroll wheel at all. It just looks like one. It’s just a directional pad. You have to click your way through the menus and songs.
9. Making playlists isn’t quite intuitive if you've never done it without the benefit of third party software before. I finally figured out how to do it relatively easily in Vista without using anything.
10. The player plays everything that is sampled at the standard 44100 Hz slightly slowly. It’s just about imperceptible unless you have a really good ear (I didn’t notice it and probably never would have if I hadn’t read about it). The only remedy until they fix the firmware (if they can/do) is to resample everything to 48000 Hz. Or you can simply deal with it. I don’t like even knowing it’s running slow even if I can’t tell so I re-ripped everything and resampled it.
11. I don't find the equalizer to be very useful for some reason. The presets sound terrible for the most part and the manual adjustment isn't as flexible as I would like for it to be. It just doesn't seem to work the way most equalizers I've used work. I think Sandisk needs to work on this equalizer in a future firmware because it's basically useless the way it is.
How glitches like this happen on a professionally designed and manufactured product is beyond me. It’s like leaving your house for work in the morning half-dressed and then being surprised when someone points it out. You can only screw up and be surprised about it so many times before it just becomes obvious that you're not paying attention to detail and/or are not really concerned with turning out quality products. It might help if they had someone take these products and actually use them before they put them on store shelves. A discount price is really no excuse for shoddy quality.
Conclusion - Having said all that, I have to say that this thing (with all of it's flaws) is an incredible value for the money and is tantalizingly close to perfection. A giant killer. For the price and the features, the only real reason not to buy would be if questionable longevity would deter you or you absolutely need more storage. You’ll want to look at the Clip’s big brother (The Fuze) if you want expandability.
Unfortunately, due to my previous bad experience with an earlier Sansa model, I can only tentatively recommend this at this time. I haven’t owned it long enough to comment decisively on it’s durability. I’m thrilled with it so far for what I paid and what I got.
Apple’s latest Shuffle redesign (Half the capacity of the Sansa Clip, proprietary headphones and no screen) is just an embarrassing spectacle of arrogant complacency. Hard to believe for a company that has (admittedly) been ahead of the curve on many things. Makes you wonder how much of Apple's success is just dumb luck.
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