Hi All, have just purchased a set of Sennheiser HD 380 pro's and would like a decent MP3 player to make the most of them, the sound coming out of my HTC desire isn't great plus the Android MP3 player sucks! Any suggestions for around £150? Large HD isn't a preference as I can update it every evening. All about sound quality! Any suggestions? Thanks Long
Now that you have some nice cans, it's more likely that your bitrate is to blame. With a good headset, anything less than 320 is going to sound less pleasant. If at all possible re-encode your collection in lossless for the best sound.
well the cowon players have the best sound quality so get a cowon J3, has a very nice screen and a very good battery life, much better than a ipod http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cowon-J3-8G...2EGY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1307568158&sr=8-3
Uhh my SD card in the Android phone is FAT32.... Got Jeff Buckley - Grace in MP3 and FLAC so will give it a try now....
Cowan, theyre the only true quality portables. Theyre also not tied into proprietary formats hence give you the option to go FLAC. Just remember though, the quality of your file is also determined by the quality of the rip - not just the format. There are good and bad FLAC rips. Try EAC or dbPowerAmp for the best.
FLAC is noticeably better, not sure how good the RIP I have is! Are all of their products the same sound quality? Are the more expensive models just loaded with more space and features?
A descent MP3 player is not far... if you are in the U.S or U.K or Canada (online only for Canada), you can acquire a Microsoft Zune. The Zune HD music player does 1 thing and one thing only, and does it very well: Music. It also comes with pretty descent headphones. Of course, they are not great, but the headphones and the MP3 player is far better than the iPod or iPhone. It can also play music. In the U.K and U.S (and later internationally based on this tweak from Microsoft: http://www.winrumors.com/microsoft-...feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+WinRumors+(WinRumors)) where for a small monthly fee (or per year, which gets cheaper). or 15$ U.S per month (I think it's a bit cheaper in the U.K) (assuming a per month subscription, and not per year), you get unlimited music download in very high MP3 quality. In the U.S, you also get to be able to keep 10 songs of your choice, DRM free, in also the same high quality MP3 which you get to keep. The software used to sync with the Zune HD, is the Zune desktop software, which is excellent, light, and very responsive. It's the same software for the Windows Phone 7. If you want to check out the Zune pass, you can get a 14-day trial for free, which you can access via the Zune software. They are of course better music players out there, but it's affordable, and massacre most music players out there, in term of audio quality. It's definitely worth a look.
I've been extremely happy with the Sony NW A3000, it's basically a re-cased HD5 which was designed with audiophile sound quality in mind. But then I prefer Sony's warm sound signature, a decent cowan is just as good but has a more clinical sound which some people prefer. The difference between this and my old creative muvo is staggering with the right set of earphones and properly encoded MP3's (Lame VBR at highest quality, not CBR, they use a different algorithm). With cheap earphones you probably won't notice the difference. I've not been able to hear for myself if more recent Sony models have improved or compromised their sound for other features but these are dedicated MP3 players and I've yet to hear anything else so portable sound nearly as good, Cowans excepted of course. You can pick a second hand one up off ebay for around £40.
Cowon. Or, as above, Sansa Clip. Plays FLAC and is very good, plus storage capacity is potentially huge through expansion and it's a perfect size to take everywhere without worrying about.
+1 Sansa and headphone amp. Fiio being a sensible choice there. Besides the Cowons (I've not tried the more modern ones though) all the rest are just about features and marketing as that's what sells a portable. Take the same file and same headphones between a Clip and an ipod, you'll literally laugh! Anythingbutipod is a good info source.
What he said or a sansa fuze much better than ipod getting both soon expandable up to 16gb micro sd £15 on amazon Got a Hippo Box + if you're intrested in buying a small portable amp
Are you sure you meant to say that flacs are program dependent? Whilst obviously the source material will have an impact & there's a range of compression from 1-8 (8 being the most compressed - simply taking longer to encode & requires more processing power to play), the whole point of lossless audio codecs like flac (ape, shn, etc) is that if you decompress them again you end up with the same audio data as you started with. [NB obviously variances in id tags can make them look different] So it's no different that altering the compression settings in WinRAR or WinZip or whatever - & any program (or player) that can interpret them will play/decode them at the same (original) quality - again assuming the hardware is capable of the playing at the chosen compression level in real time. Now, whilst there have been revisions of all/most of the lossless codecs over time (though i think the last revision of flac was 2007), these have been about improving compression &/or odd bug fixes rather than because there was something inherently wrong with the thing... ...&, ttbomk, all of the encoding/decoding programs use the default (open source) library dll & default to the 4096 block size - so unless a program were to randomly create a tiny or huge block size (which would simply alter the success of the compression) then... Otherwise, i do agree that dbPowerAmp is a great program (i use it & Audition 5.5 almost exclusively for most things), but you could simply use something like the free FLAC FrontEnd (having first installed the codec) in the extra's section of the official site.
It's not technically an MP3 player, but the Samsung Galaxy S has an extremely good audio chip (some Wolfson design). It sounds especially good with the Voodoo Sound mod, and I'm just using Sennheiser CX300s!!
Kinda, though it's actually dependent on the ripping rather than the encoding. I didn't make that explicit in my earlier post. dbPowerAmp, when properly configured and calibrated to your CD drive, produced much better sound files that when just installed and ran using the default settings.
Cowon j3 playing flac files is the way forward. Fantastic music quality coupled with a vibrant screen for the odd episode of family guy. Great battery life too.
Imod : YES ! Ipod : NO ! The DAC is pretty decent on 4th/5th generation apple devices, but the amp is pure bullsh!t . The Imod is a modded Ipod that directly output the signal coming from the Wolfson DAC. You'll then need a portable headphone amp. With your budget, Sansa + headamp
Ah - fair enough... i use Audition for ripping out of habit - well, i was using that long before i knew of dbPowerAmp. ...at least there's clarity (&, i think, agreement) now.
Yep, the whole ripping/streaming process has taken a lot of my professional life over the past few years since we stopped making CD players and moved solely to digital streamers. We've used the following rippers extensively... EAC - very, very good but also very powerful and complex, offputting for some. Ripstation Micro DS - very, very simple but pretty poor quality rips. Shame since I used this for most of my music collection (approx 1500 CDs). iTunes - awful, regardless of which settings and codecs used. DBPowerAmp - great out of the box, but far superior when properly calibrated and configured with Acurate Rip. This has become the weapon of choice. MAX (Apple Max) - seems to be the best ripper on the Mac platform Mac The Ripper - not really got under the bonnet of this one yet. Bizarrely, the FLAC "compression" setting does make a difference in audio quality with some playback devices. It's not that the "file contents" are any different as they're all lossless, however some hardware struggles to decode the "more compressed" files quickly enough, which seems to put a strain on the device hence slightly degrading playback quality.
