[johnanderson]

I'll start off with an old iriver flash player. I think it was one of the first ones to come out and back then I paid $50 for 32mb. The thing could hold like 8 songs at 128kbs, which I guess was impressive back in the day. It was a pretty decent deal back then, especially since I bought it on black friday from bestbuy. My other purchase was my sony cd player way back when. I guess for $50 I couldnt really complain, especially since I had no idea head-fi existed then. Currently no regrets with my x5 other than the gap between skipping songs. I didn't think mp3 players would become so mainstream and cheap, especially compared to when I first started looking at them.

I'm currently more surprised at the prices and storage space that people are able to produce these things at. Its especially a big leap considering a year ago the sansa 4gb model wouldve cost $140, which was a good deal, and now costs a fraction of that. I guess that means in a year I will be upgrading to a 30gb flashed based player

 

[Trippytiger]

In terms of cost-to-storage ratio, my dearly departed Rio Nitrus was probably the worst. $200 for a 1.5 GB hard drive player? Yikes! Nice enough player, though, and when it died I cashed in the warranty and upgraded to a Rio Carbon that gave me two good years of service.

 

[grawk]

No point in complaining about what price technology used to demand. I paid $5 for a 128k 8" floppy in 1983. I sold 500MB hard drives for $500 in 1992 to help pay for college. My cellphone has more computing power than the vax I worked on in 1984. And has better graphics than my amiga, which was the high water mark of it's day. Technology gets cheaper, faster, better. It's not an investment, it's an expense

 

[Trippytiger]

Quote:

Originally Posted by grawk /img/forum/go_quote.gif It's not an investment, it's an expense

Ain't that the truth!

 

[LaBreaHead]

I recently found the receipt for a 256MB Creative Muvo -- over $100! Of course, the market was different four years ago. A lot different. But oddly, I got my money's worth out of it -- it was a good re-beginning after the highs and lows of my first DAP, a 10GB iPod "for Windows," with its deplorable battery performance.

Those two players, though, really got me even more interested in my music again -- and got me buying more DAPs, and reading Head-Fi, and buying more earphones and headphones.

 

[Dregur]

The old Zen Micro. 5 GB's of storage for a non color display and crappy battery life. Meh.

Oh, and I had to re-solder the headphone jack because it got loose.

-The Grinman

 

[-=Germania=-]

Uhh...

2001 -> iRock MP3 128MB (~$300)

There were no tags, only an LCD that looked exactly like that on a CD player. The controls were just a small wheel on the side.

 

[shigzeo]

whatever happened to the ipod flea?

 

[sinner6]

I paid $399 for the 64 Mb Creative Nomad II when it came out, I thought it was a steal since 64Mb of SmartMedia ran $299.00 on its own at the time.

I cringe to think of it now. Opposite end of the spectrum, the best deal I got was the Zune 80 for 249.00. or 3 cents per megabyte versus $6.23 per megabyte for the Creative.

 

[azncookiecutter]

I paid $200 for a 256 MB iRiver iFP-190 5 years ago. For that price now, you can get a 8GB anything these days. The quote about technology being an expense, not an investment is quite true.
And to the above post about the Zen Micro: it was a solid player back then despite the headphone jack and battery life. I think my sister still has mine, and it's running just fine these days, despite it being a brick (compared to the DAPs we have today).

 

[IronStomach]

I had a Rio 600, which was a 32MB flash player. The interface, build quality, and battery life were all fantastic, I really enjoyed it... but you could fit a total of nine songs or so.

 

[jinp6301]

Toshiba Gigabeat S

It crashed all the time and i paid like 350 for it

but it sounded AMAZING

 

[GreatDane]

iPod 2G shuffle.

It was a rip-off when I bought one and they're a rip-off now. lol