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Originally Posted by DrBenway  Is that a matter of raw processing power, or the lack of it, or is it a matter of poor design that doesn't effectively exploit processing power? Or are there other issues that contribute to excess noise?
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The e200 has the same dual 80mhz cores as damn near all portalplayer DAPs (most ipods, etc).
It's a matter of board routing, power supply bypassing, component placement, etc.
They allow switching noise from the circuit that drives the backlight to bleed into the audio power supply, for example.
From a digital perspective there's nothing wrong with the design - but the audio output suffers due to the lack of finesse.
Sandisk repented, hired smarter engineers (or just stopped outsourcing to MSI), and the 2nd generation sansas have no such issues. Also a dramatically faster single-core Austria Microsystems SoC replacing the relatively antiquated PortalPlayer chip.
Edit: If you meant difficulty to decode, then yes - the old portalplayer chips (and most other chips used in older DAPs) just aren't very fast. APE seems to have been designed for archival. It can compress very tight but there is no DAP in existence that can decode it's highest compression levels in real time. FLAC on the other hand seems to have been designed for playback, and is very easy to decode, but doesn't compress as tight as APE.
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