What a fantastic unit
Written: Jul 14 '03
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Pros: GREAT sound
Beautiful enclosure
Excellent Tuner section
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: I can't imagine what you could do to improve this product.
(OK, titanium case, 300GB storage, nuclear fuel cell)
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| wn2tmd's Full Review: iRiver iFP-390T (256 MB) MP3 Player |
This well may be the best player/Recorder on the market now. It's super suave enclosure, blue display, great joystick, tremendous sound and excellent Tuner section make it pretty much flawless.
I'm the chief engineer for two local FM stations and a performing musician. My ears are tweaked for identifying the characteristics of audio. I can tell you what the source is and most of the specs from a 60 second listen to anything. That said, when I powered up the IFP-390t, my jaw dropped.
In designing any circuit to deliver audio to speakers/earphones, you have to balance three things- Efficiency, distortion and current drain. You just can't have all three. Somehow, Iriver has gotten all three in this unit. It's output amp is twice as powerful as most, it can cleanly drive any set of earphones I have to earsplitting volume, blows away the sound of my Archos 20, and runs for 20 hours on one AA cell. Got me..Hats off to Iriver. I don't know how they did it. I'd swear it's sound coming from a 25 watt sterophile-grade component amplifier.
It's that clean.
Secondly, you may have noticed that FM radios have gotten worse and worse in consumer devices. Whoever made the FM tuner chip for the Iriver did it right. It's exactly on par with my car's radio. That's a big feat for something with an internal volume of about a cubic inch. What a great tuner. The recorded audio from the FM tuner was a identical to the original.
The software worked flawlessly and I am looking forward to the next revision where it will just pop up as another drive. Also, take your set of MP3's for the Iriver and double them (about 100 songs), then batch convert them to WMA files at 64KB variable. There is no loss...and you get twice the storage.
Lastly, the enclosure is totally cool. They brought in some outside design bureau on this one. It's beyond ergometric.
It looks like a hover-craft.
I ordered mine direct from Iriver...good price- quick delivery. Try this one on your friends- Put it in a shoe box and put the headphones on them..then pull it out -dangling from your keychain.
This thing seriously rocks -get one.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199
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Epinions.com ID:
wn2tmd
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Member: Robert Nagy
Location: Austin, Texas
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
Chief Engineer 91.7 FM/TV 9 Austin-Photographer-Ham Radio Op -traveler.
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