Recommended "MP3" player for prog use?

Hu humm ive got a discman AND a mp3 player and i use the same headphones and stuf....but even at 192kbps i had to stop listen to the mp3 player because of the sound quailty being THAT awfulll  Sorry if you first have heard how good music can sound it is painful to listen to the crappy sound quailty of a mp3 player.

I mean if you are used to listen to mp3 files in 64kbps and then hears 128kbps ones then you would hate to get back to the old ones...

There you are again Lindsay Lohan knows what (s)he says!
MP3 and other compressed format is the worst crap ever and a regression in sound quality, like the CD is compared to vynil/tape.

MP3 is thin, harsh, flat, bright(in the pejorative way) etc...


Here's my tapedeck (Nakamichi 1000):



It beats all the digital you want...



Edited by oliverstoned

In just about every hardware test I've read (and I read loads of hardware tests because I'm a sad techno-nerd), Creative products have the best sound quality - and small wonder, since they've been creating digital music technology since the early 1990s.

I still remember buying my first "Sound Blaster" PC card in 1991, when almost no PCs had sound, and being bowled over backwards at having not only real sound, but the ability to record myself playing and manipulate the sound with no quality loss!

But I digress...

I much prefer the sound of my Discman to any other portable music solution, but Creative mp3 players sound the best of all the solid state ones, IMO.

I was more impressed with the AWE 32, which had Wavetable synthesis and the ability to process the innovative idea of Soundfonts, stored in memory on the card itself - a fully-fledged sampler on a soundcard!

This was brilliant, because it meant I didn't have to splash out £1,000 on a sampler, but I could use Vienna soundfont studio to create my own samples of sounds and incorporate them in mixes, so my budget PC could do most of the things a professional studio could do.

Using MIDI, you could sync the sampled waveforms easily and get such a degree of accurracy in the notes that you could write "impossible" music that sounded like it was half being played by humans and half as processed digital music - very fashionable in the early 1990s.

I've got recordings somewhere...

In terms of computer based soundcards, Creative all had the major flaw of not natively supporting 44.1kHz sample rate right up until the very newest one!

^ goose is right ... the Audigy cards don't support 44.1khz - they upsample it to 96khz. Which is nota bad thing - most "audiophile" CD players do the same.

^ doesn't matter anyway, because the topic is "what's the best mp3 player for prog".

^ sure ... in terms of difference to the other soundcards at the time.

Why use 192 anyway? You could at least go for something intended to be transparent.

Lindsay Lohan wrote: Ah i have never heard the AWE32 hu humm but i got one pc with a SB16 and that is what MIDI should sound like! Todays soundcards sound awfull when they playback MIDI sequences

The AWE uses the same Roland MPU401 MIDI processor as the SB16 does, but it was the first soundcard to incorporate the newly acquired EMU 8000 hardware for sound synthesis. The 32, confusingly, referred to the number of simultaneous voices that it could process in hardware. The AWE64 added 32 more, but in software.

MIDI playback with an AWE32 is in a new dimension, compared with the SB16, as you can map Soundfonts to the MIDI tables, thus replacing the dodgy MIDI piano sounds with, e.g. a high resolution Steinway.

 

...but if you're looking for a cheap mp3 player, then the CnMemory A-MP3 MusicBox looks a good option, as you can carry a supply of SD cards around, so that you don't run out of music.

It's really cheap, so it probably sounds horrible - but it looks like a good portable solution.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID= 159413

 

Edited by Certif1ed