Once you learn ALL the nuances it’s a sweet little gadget
Written: Jan 05 '05 (Updated Nov 02 '05)
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Pros: Great sound; fair price; stylish design; customizable EQ; battery charges quickly.
Cons: Music Match software slow and crashes often; headphones inferior quality; thumbwheel can be annoying.
The Bottom Line: For a high end product it should be a little more user friendly, but you definitely get your money's worth.
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| Chad9976's Full Review: Dell DJ (15 GB) MP3 Player |
With all the MP3 players flooding the consumer electronics market these days it’s difficult for the average person to know what else is available besides Apple’s iPod. Dell’s Digital Jukebox is definitely a viable candidate for title of “World’s Second-Best MP3 Player.” And that’s a compliment.
DELL DJ - THE GOOD NEWS:
SOUND: Overall sound quality is good to very good and sometimes excellent. It has some equalizer pre-sets as well as a customizable EQ. I was amazed it was able to pick up very low bass levels without distortion at high volumes (such as Sublime’s “Garden Grove”).
MENU NAVIGATION: If you’re going to have thousands of songs at your fingertips you need to be able to get to the song you want rather quickly, don’t you think? I like how you can browse through your collection by artist, genre or album title and get to the song you want to hear. You can browse the menus while a playlist is playing without interrupting it, and even create a new playlist too.
AESTHETICS: The Dell DJ is great-looking with the silver design and the cool blue backlighting. The buttons are well arranged and you should have no trouble discerning which button is which even when you can’t see them (when it’s in your pocket, for example). It stays clean rather easily, too.
BATTERY: It’s possible to get up to 16 hours of playing time before needing a recharge. One hour is really all you need to charge the unit. You can even charge it through your computer’s USB port if it’s at least 33% full.
ADDITIONAL FEATURES: The Dell DJ doubles as a portable file storage device, so you could actually use it as an external hard drive. There’s also a built-in microphone which is helpful if you’ve ever wanted to record your voice digitally.
PRICE: As of this writing the Apple iPod is probably only 10 to 17% more expensive than the Dell DJ, but I’d expect Dell to continually lower its price to stay competitive. Used DJs sell for significantly less on eBay than iPods, a good option for anyone looking to save even more money.
DELL DJ - THE BAD NEWS:
HEADPHONES & VOLUME: Although they were able to deliver good sound quality that was really only in a quiet place with the volume turned up almost to the max. At the gym I’d have them up full volume and could usually hear background noise. Plus the fact these earbuds are so smooth and designed as one-size-fits-all they often just slipped right out of my ears! I tried using a few different headphones and the sound quality improved with better ones, however, the maximum volume wasn’t always as loud as I wanted it to be. And even though there’s a custom EQ, this thing could really stand to use a bass boost feature.
MUSIC MATCH SOFTWARE: This software was terribly designed for massive amounts of tracks. That’s a theory of mine that seems to hold up since this software “acts up” or just crashes on every computer I’ve used it on. Music Match is extremely slow to do anything involving the Dell DJ. You hit the “portable device” button and you just wait and wait for it to pop up. Not only that, it must have taken over an hour to download 2,100 songs to my Dell DJ, and that was even using USB 2.0. Another quirk is how it assigns a genre to every song and those are usually wrong (it actually put some Linkin Park songs under “blues” and Metallica under “country”). Going through a couple thousand songs and re-labeling the genres was a major pain. And every time you rip another CD or even just a few songs to MP3 format you have to go through the process of fitting them into your playlists just where you want them which is daunting for those of us with large music collections.
MENU NAVIGATION: Yes, I put this under the good news, but there’s a few problems I’d like to mention. First of all, you have to download the updated firmware in order to simply play all tracks on command. Second of all, using that thumbwheel can cramp your hand up if you have to scroll through a few hundred or thousands of songs to select the next one in your playlist, instead of either going to the next one in line or whichever one the computer picks at random. Let’s say you’re listening to a song that starts with the letter A and you want to hear a song that starts with the letter M next. You can’t go to the menu and select it by the artist because that would open up a new playlist and you’d only play just that one song. You COULD put it on “shuffle” mode and skip around until you got close to the song you wanted to hear and scroll a shorter distance that way, but then you wouldn’t be able to hear the initial song you were listening to. Oh, and before you did any of that you would have had to make a playlists of all the songs in alphabetical order, which is totally different from the “play all tracks” option.
IT’S A DELL PRODUCT: You can’t buy a Dell DJ at Circuit City like you can with an iPod. If you want a new one with a “real” warranty you should go to dell.com and purchase there. Or do as I did and get one on eBay at your own risk. And if something should go wrong with your player you have to send it back to Dell, even if it’s just to have the battery replaced.
MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE DELL DJ:
I got my Dell DJ in the summer of 2004 on the recommendation from a co-worker who raved about his. I’m in the Navy and we were in the middle of an overseas deployment at the time. I was getting sick of my discman and wanted something that could hold a couple thousand songs so I wouldn’t have to keep switching CDs all the time. I checked eBay and saw that Dell DJ’s were cheaper than iPods so I bought a brand new one with “warranty” for about $200. I believe that’s slightly cheaper than buying one directly from Dell (although they don’t appear to be selling the 15GB model anymore).
When I first started using my Dell DJ I had a lot of mixed feelings about it. I was elated that I was able to do everything I planned to do with it, such as play all 2,100 of my MP3s at random and make playlists for use at the gym or while I was sleeping. However, trying to get the Music Match software to work took forever and a day since the program kept crashing on me. At first I figured it was my friend’s computer but after trying it on several computers I got the same result so that’s why I am not a big fan of Music Match.
As far as my day-to-day use of the DJ, it went smoothly for the most part. I would go to bed with a “rockabye” playlist playing and then charge it when I went to work every morning. It was great for use at the gym as I could listen to all the “high octane” songs while I worked out and they really helped motivate me. I even used it as an auxiliary device on the stereo in my workspace. This was a lot more convenient for my co-workers and I since we could skip around to different bands and genres without the hassle of having to comb through binders of CDs looking for something we could agree on.
Overall I was satisfied with my purchase and only had a few problems. I already mentioned the issue with Music Match. Also, I noticed my battery’s life was a lot shorter than the supposed 16-hour life Dell claimed (mine was closer to 10 or less). And lastly the DJ froze up on me several times and I had to completely wipe its memory at least once. All those problems were extremely annoying and I still carry a bit of a grudge towards the DJ because of them. However, I chalk them up to the fact mine was most likely a refurbished product since I bought it on eBay and not through Dell directly.
Once we returned from deployment I found I had little use for the jukebox and sold it on eBay this Christmas and was able to recoup almost all the money I had spent on it. I’m sure that little gadget is making its new owner happy, and I’m happy for them. As for me, I’m going to look at an iPod next time I go MP3 player shopping, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook the Dell Digital Jukebox.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 190.00
Recommended for: Music Lovers - High Capacity Storage for an Entire Album Collection
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Epinions.com ID:
Chad9976
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Member: Chad Polenz
Location: Albany, New York
Reviews written: 675
Trusted by: 152 members
About Me:Check out Chad'z Beer Reviews on YouTube
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