Dell Jukebox Owner who concedes defeat to the Ipod
Written: Nov 19 '04
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Pros: Battery Life, Pretty Blue Lights, Custom Four Band EQ, Price
Cons: Sound is subpar to the Ipod, MusicMatch is Horrible!
The Bottom Line: The Dell Jukebox is a great player, but I wish I had shelled out the extra dough for the ipod.
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| jdroth's Full Review: Dell DJ (15 GB) MP3 Player |
I have owned and used a Dell Jukebox for almost a year now and I love it. It breaks my heart to report to you that it truly is mediocre when compared to the ipod. I use my Dell Jukebox everyday, and enjoy it very much. My sister recently bought a third generation ipod and for the first time I got a chance to put them head to head. Sadly my Jukebox got romped.
The most important difference is sound. Plain and simple the ipod sounded better. I was always impressed with the great sound of my jukebox but there is no comparison. I tried both players using the ear buds and my Sennheiser headphones. With every set of headphones the difference was obvious.
I love tweaking my Jukebox with the custom EQ setting, and the ipod does not offer this feature, but with the ipod I did not feel the need to customize. Using the ipod's plethora of preset EQ’s I was always able to get the sound I was looking for. Plus sometimes when I boost a certain frequency too much on the Dell it begins to distort, there is no distortion with the ipod’s EQ.
Not only did the ipod sound better but it also was able to drive both sets of headphones at a much louder volume without any distortion. That is so important when trying to hear your music over the New York City rush hour subway madness.
Another difference that stood out was the ability to scroll and scan to the middle of a song with ease using the ipod. You simply use the thumb wheel as a jog wheel and it shows you visually where you are in the song. This makes it very easy to go back and forth quickly to find a certain section of a tune. The Dell uses the normal method of holding down the fast forward or rewind button which leaves you waiting 2 seconds before it starts jogging, and it is very difficult to stop the jog with any accuracy.
I also need to give it up to the ipod for the thumb wheel, compared to the barrel wheel of the Dell. The barrel wheel has not slowed me down much using the Jukebox, but the ipod’s thumb wheel is faster and more accurate when scrolling through thousands of titles.
The only thing I have always hated about The Jukebox is the MusicMatch software used to connect the Jukebox to your computer. I have always used MusicMatch to rip and encode MP3’s and it is great for that, but the clunky plug in used to connect to the jukebox is so unstable that I never got it to work properly with my computer without crashing. I have since resorted to a piece of third party software called “Dudebox” which works, but is nothing more then functional to add and delete tunes on the player. You can’t even begin to compare that with itunes, which is a down right elegant piece of software all around. All my sister does is plug in her ipod and then itunes takes over. It automatically updates her ipod with any changes to her itunes library seamlessly.
Finally the last and most obvious difference is form factor. Once again the ipod takes the cake being lighter and smaller. I still love my jukebox’s pretty blue lights, but the backlights on the ipod have a cool trick of fading off like the dome lights in fancy cars. Very Cool.
I will continue to use and love my Jukebox, but sadly I now wish I shelled out the extra bucks for the superior ipod.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 250
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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jdroth
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