On Sun, 06 Feb 2005 16:57:23 GMT, DAB sounds worse than FM wrote:
Giovanni Landman wrote:
On Sat, 05 Feb 2005 16:32:02 GMT, Richard L wrote:
In message
"DAB sounds worse than FM" wrote:
Bear in mind this is for the kitchen. It's intended to replace a DAB
portable radio,
I suppose this is consistent with your previous habit of
recommending people to buy mp3 players in place of DAB radios.
But they don't do the same job. How can you listen to the six
o'clock news on an mp3 player?
My mp3 player (Philips HDD070) has an FM radio on board.
Does the HDD070 sound any good?
Well, apart from the quality of current generation of in-ear headphones
(back my treble demand!), and some volume limitation (if you really like
volume level 10 you're probably out of luck) it does sound very good.
It's FM radio reception is not that perfect. That shouldn't come as a
surprise, as that's the case with nearly any portable which uses the
headphone lead as the antenna. It's an extra drawback in my case (Tx of
my favourite radio stations at least 30 miles away). Luckily, it's got a
sort of auto-fallback to mono, which reduces the FM noise considerably,
even to virtually zero, after half a minute or so.
Some further features I really like:
- the sleep timer: 15, 30 or 60 mins (my killer app!);
- configurable backlight and repeat/shuffle modes;
- configurable shortcut key "": equalizer, bass boost or shuffle/repeat
mode select
- mp3 and wma playback "only", I don't really need AAC or WAV
- 10 h playtime max (my practice: 9 h with 5 sec. backlight setting)
.... just to say: I use it every day, I really like it. I bought it in
the beginning of December, and I didn't regret it for a single moment.
It's a good player, it's got an FM radio, it's considerably cheaper than
"the real IPod", it's capacity is just good enough, not too little (1 GB
or less), not too large (4 GB or more).
(No, I don't have a job at Philips, below are some drawbacks ;-)
Some remarks about the software that comes with it:
- the musicmatch Jukebox software looks nice, but the
database/transfer/storage driver is very slow, even with USB2.0 you can
only get a few 100s KB/s;
- the Philips DMM software looks as it's originated from the Stone Age,
needs JRE, and therefore is a slow starter. However, it provides better
data transfer rates: it fully fills my USB1.1 only bus at some 900 KB/s
(with the imperfect [cough] win98 USB mass storage driver on a PII/350).
Luckily, the player *can* transfer files at USB2.0 only speeds.
Furthermore, this player uses some basis principle you may not like: it
has some sort of database to store the ID3 tag information. The player
gets all the song identification information from that, it doesn't use
the filenames. So you can't just drop 'n drag your files to your
portable player drive letter, you have to use the software for that.
So you'd better have at least 90% of your files tagged, or otherwise you
get crazy from all "untitled"s.
I'm considering one of these:
http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Product...07&GroupID=847
The HDD060? At that price? Don't do that! That one hasn't got an FM
radio either. Really can't get it any cheaper? My 2GB & FM radio HDD070
was some £140 (¤ 200) 2 months ago.
Finally, further specs can be found at philips.com - portable
entertainment.
Good luck!
--
mvg,
Giovanni.
PC Speakers
Hybrid Mode
