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It was like pulling teeth but I finally found out ONLY the the obscure Cowon brand of MP3 players has a balance/pan control. So what? Doesn’t every hi-fi amplifier and car stereo have a balance control? Yes they do and yes an MP3 player has a little hi-fi headphone amplifier in it. But no. Only iRiver and Cowon have a balance/pan control and the hard of hearing MUST have that feature.
As for hearing loss in one part of your audio spectrum (caused by damage to some of your cilia in you inner ear), good luck on selecing and “EQ” that compensates. And if you get an MP3 player with a dinky graphic equalizer, you probably can only adjust it in the “settings” menu and not while you are listening to music!
I should mention that CNet tested some MP3 players and found the the $39 (on Amazon.com) SanDisk sansa clipit+ sounded just as good or better than the overpriced Apple iPod Classic (And only the Classic! The other iPods don’t sound that good), the Microsoft Zune, and the Sony Walkman.
Further the SanDisk sansa clipit+ is one of the few MP3 players with the sophisticated Replay Audio volume-leveling DSP routine built in. Enable it and you will never have to futz with the volume control while ridiing again.
And then there is sorting through the 1000s and 1000s of MPs today’s players hold. Most players only let you sort by MP3 metada “tags” such as “artist,” “album,” “title,” and “genere.” Well there is no spell checker (you would not believe how many ways they spell “Alanis Morissette” – that’s the right number of l’s, n’s, s’s, t’s and theres an e on the end) for MP3s and no copy editor enforcing consistancy and the MP3 standard allows Unicode (I have seen Bjork tags in what I assume are Icelandic!) so pleople can, and do, type anything in the world into those tags. So good luck using them to search. The clipit+? If you file your MP3s away in folders with the group’s or artist’s names with maybe a subfolder for each CD, well then the clipit+ allows you to search on your folders.
Li-Ion batteries are good for only 300-500 recharges. So when your clipit+ battery poops out, jsut get a new clipit+. $40 is about what replacemetn Li-Ion batteries cost. iPods? I think you have to send them back to Apple and pay a shop fee, postage, and the OEM price for the battery. I mean has anyone ever seen a battery-compartment lid on an iPod?
Mp3 players, some of which cost over $200, are just another kind of audio amplifer. There has been a mass market for IC headphone amplifers since Sony stunned the world with the Walkman. There are several analog IC companies making tham and they all have wide range of models in their lines Their spec sheets thorougly characterize the amplifiers, natrually.
So where are the usual audio-amlifier specifications from MP3 playermakers? They often quote no more than the dynamic range or signal-to-noise ratio SNR in decibels (dB). If it is anywhere 96 dB, it is a fake spec! You see the number of bits an anlaog signal is digitized to (16 bits in the case of MP3s) is exactly the same spec as SNR, just if a different form. The range from the smallest number 16 bits can express (zero, duh!) to two the sixteen power is simply the range of the softest to the loudest sound the ripper’s analog-to-digital converter can handle. So there is this simple forumla that converts bit to dB. Howevever that is the THEORETICAL SNR. In actual practice, there are all sorts of unavoidable souces of noise so the achieveable (and measured) SNR is always less than 96 dB. Secondly the bel is a “dimensionless ratio” and is meaningless Unless it is “referred” to something. In which case you will see somthing like dBu, dBv, or dBm. Without the referring modifer, the dB spec is probably just being parroted by some moron from the company;s marketing department.
And where are total-harmonic-distortion and noise (THD+N), gain flatness, intermodualtion distortionm etc.? These specs have been available for audio amplifers since “Audio” consumer audiophile magazine started publishing in the 1950s.
LOL!