Theresamarie1
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Nov 3, 2003
- Posts
- 234
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- 0
I've been wanting to upgrade my portable music equipment which currently stands as an archos 20gb multimedia player and numerous portable headphones (portapros, sony earbuds, grado gr80s, ety er-6's). I'm looking for both a more compact and lighter package as well as higher music quality.
To do my research I've been spending some time going through the head-fi forum posts over the last couple of weeks trying to understand the opinions and/or facts about various options for high quality portable music.
I am a music lover, and electrical engineer/designer/geek, but by no means an audiophile from the equipment engineeirng standpoint.
I've noticed that a lot of folks use MD players and/or CD players instead of hard drive players.
For CD players I can understand that you're getting the potential for the highest recorded quality, as to whether the outputs on portable equipment maintain that quality is another question which so many of you debate and/or measure qualitatively.
For MD players, it seems to me that you're dealing with the same kinds of compression questions that hard driver players deal with, which is how much sonic degradation is added with the various compression formats. Is this the right way to look at it?
So is there any real benefit to using MD players over hard disk players? Battery life maybe? They're not terribly smaller in footprint but the disks are smaller, is this the benefit? And why use a minidisk player when a hard drive or memory player would do the same? My concern is that I'm missing the primary point here and that I should be going in the MD direction?
One of the reasons I'm asking is that I've ordered a couple of next generation hard drive players, to test out, which are the iriver ihp 120 and archos gmini 220, which should be shipped next week as well as a pimeta headphone amplifier from Headsave. What I'm seeing in the forum though is that many don't feel that using an amplifier on a device with headphone out makes any sense. Also, many folks seem to disagree that any kind of mp3 compression yields high quality audio. So what's a person to do for high quality portable music or shouldn't high quality and portable be used in the same breath?
For comparison, I've also purchased a new IPOD and returned it because I didn't find the sound quality to be much/any improved over the archos but the interface sure is slick. And, for $400 the battery life, as well as feature list, seems very short compared to the other next generation players.
Any comments on my direction and/or observations?
Suggestions? Or totally without hope?
To do my research I've been spending some time going through the head-fi forum posts over the last couple of weeks trying to understand the opinions and/or facts about various options for high quality portable music.
I am a music lover, and electrical engineer/designer/geek, but by no means an audiophile from the equipment engineeirng standpoint.
I've noticed that a lot of folks use MD players and/or CD players instead of hard drive players.
For CD players I can understand that you're getting the potential for the highest recorded quality, as to whether the outputs on portable equipment maintain that quality is another question which so many of you debate and/or measure qualitatively.
For MD players, it seems to me that you're dealing with the same kinds of compression questions that hard driver players deal with, which is how much sonic degradation is added with the various compression formats. Is this the right way to look at it?
So is there any real benefit to using MD players over hard disk players? Battery life maybe? They're not terribly smaller in footprint but the disks are smaller, is this the benefit? And why use a minidisk player when a hard drive or memory player would do the same? My concern is that I'm missing the primary point here and that I should be going in the MD direction?
One of the reasons I'm asking is that I've ordered a couple of next generation hard drive players, to test out, which are the iriver ihp 120 and archos gmini 220, which should be shipped next week as well as a pimeta headphone amplifier from Headsave. What I'm seeing in the forum though is that many don't feel that using an amplifier on a device with headphone out makes any sense. Also, many folks seem to disagree that any kind of mp3 compression yields high quality audio. So what's a person to do for high quality portable music or shouldn't high quality and portable be used in the same breath?
For comparison, I've also purchased a new IPOD and returned it because I didn't find the sound quality to be much/any improved over the archos but the interface sure is slick. And, for $400 the battery life, as well as feature list, seems very short compared to the other next generation players.
Any comments on my direction and/or observations?
Suggestions? Or totally without hope?