Colorfly C3 is hard to beat.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
C3 is the worst possible suggestion you could make, almost as bad as a HiFi-Man. He clearly said that he's not looking for something professional, just a nice mp3 for home use and sport. While the C3 is hardly professional, it's also anything BUT nice.
Now people are going to smite me for this...
Sansa Clip is massively overrated, and the Clip homers have so much bias it's unbelievable. Great player for $30, not very good compared to a $150 PMP with 160gb storage. And so, my main suggestion for purely listening would be iPod Classic. Big capacity, low price second hand. Depending on your headphones, an amp+LOD+iPod could hammer the clip. Nano is horrible; GUI, SQ, iTunes, form factor, price, I could go on. Although the Zune HD does look very nice and has a good screen for videos/some games, to be perfectly honest is massively overpriced ($400 are you kidding me!?), at ~$140, you could argue that it would be a bargain. Though iPod still beats it in SQ I believe. But I think it's a bit too big for sport, no?
However this being said, it doesn't answer your original question. You mentioned mp3; the iPod's strong point is its HDD and LO capabilities. You're not going to be able to fill 80-160gb with mp3s my friend. In your situation, I'd have to agree with batteraziiz; you should get the Cowon iAudio 9+, 10, or whatever the new one is called. Decent storage, good form, great SQ, I doubt you'd be displeased. Unless any of the other features I mentioned (video, storage, LO, etc.) are more important to you, or if you want to wait another year or so for the FiiO X1 to come out.
