Posted December 08, 2014
Your mind tends to wander when you're bored, and since the living room is currently occupied and I can't play Dark Souls on the console, that is what mine is doing.
And thus I began to wonder about MP3 Players, mine specifically, and the importance of a good DAC chip to sound quality. And since I can't really discuss this with anybody around here I said: "Hey I'll just throw it out on the nicest, friendsliest, most-ponyville-like of forums, and see what others have to say."
So I own a Philips 8GB GoGear Vibe and the best thing you can say about it is... it's very portable. The screen is atrocious, the color saturation never looks right, it goes bonkers unless you view it at a very specific angle angle. The brighness is too high without any way of adjusting it. Then there's the UI, horrible looking, not just ugly, but clunky. And finally there's the volume problem. When I use an audio device and crank the volume up to maximum, I like the earphones to produce an ear-blistering volume that I can't endure for more than a few seconds. With this, I barely get something loud enough to drown the ambient noise, of a normal living room.
It's good points are, well it's small, it does have a screen, and it was cheap.
And then I started thinking about its sound quality and how the most important things in a MP3 player are the codec, and the DAC.
At this point in the game the codec is moot, the mp3 codec has been around for so long and so tweaked, it should be refined to the point of alchemy. Still I think that most independent player manufacturers should have a better codec implementation than the big ones. I'd imagine the independent ones will probably use a LAME flavour of MP3 for their player, while for obvious reasons, the big guys part of the MPEG will use their own 'official' version.
So it all comes down to the DAC, which is probably the one thing other than the speakers which determines output audio quality. So you can have a nifty and shiny mp3 player, with lots of options, but if it's got a crappy DAC, you'll get something that sounds like it's been dropped in a toilet bowl. I wonder just how cheap mine is and if it's directly related to the volume issue I mentioned earlier, or if that's just an issue of power output on the minijack plug.
Now I know next to nothing about the process. The best I could describe a Digital-to-Analog conversion is as "magic". But I'm still curious. How do the DACs work their magic and what are some of the best affordable mp3 players out there right now?
And thus I began to wonder about MP3 Players, mine specifically, and the importance of a good DAC chip to sound quality. And since I can't really discuss this with anybody around here I said: "Hey I'll just throw it out on the nicest, friendsliest, most-ponyville-like of forums, and see what others have to say."
So I own a Philips 8GB GoGear Vibe and the best thing you can say about it is... it's very portable. The screen is atrocious, the color saturation never looks right, it goes bonkers unless you view it at a very specific angle angle. The brighness is too high without any way of adjusting it. Then there's the UI, horrible looking, not just ugly, but clunky. And finally there's the volume problem. When I use an audio device and crank the volume up to maximum, I like the earphones to produce an ear-blistering volume that I can't endure for more than a few seconds. With this, I barely get something loud enough to drown the ambient noise, of a normal living room.
It's good points are, well it's small, it does have a screen, and it was cheap.
And then I started thinking about its sound quality and how the most important things in a MP3 player are the codec, and the DAC.
At this point in the game the codec is moot, the mp3 codec has been around for so long and so tweaked, it should be refined to the point of alchemy. Still I think that most independent player manufacturers should have a better codec implementation than the big ones. I'd imagine the independent ones will probably use a LAME flavour of MP3 for their player, while for obvious reasons, the big guys part of the MPEG will use their own 'official' version.
So it all comes down to the DAC, which is probably the one thing other than the speakers which determines output audio quality. So you can have a nifty and shiny mp3 player, with lots of options, but if it's got a crappy DAC, you'll get something that sounds like it's been dropped in a toilet bowl. I wonder just how cheap mine is and if it's directly related to the volume issue I mentioned earlier, or if that's just an issue of power output on the minijack plug.
Now I know next to nothing about the process. The best I could describe a Digital-to-Analog conversion is as "magic". But I'm still curious. How do the DACs work their magic and what are some of the best affordable mp3 players out there right now?
Post edited December 08, 2014 by j0ekerr