Hi all,

had one of my BUY NOW! spells - when I came out of it, I had an iRiver iMP-550 in my hands

I've been using it for a few days and can't find any major fault with it - superb MP3 decoding quality - no pops, crackles or extraneous noise and passed my two test tracks. Battery life is great, as is the powerful navigation system... yes, I'm quite chuffed right now

As time goes on, I'll post more of my impressions here. If you have any queries in the meantime, ask away. The only kinda-shortcoming I've found so far is that more sedate headphones may be hard to drive

Eagerly waiting for the Ogg Vorbis update in December. Great job, iRiver!

Edit: deleted mistaken assertion that the 550 has no analog out - there is one. And fixed tag typo.

Yeah, that's true! I bought it last week and it is so great! It is so thin and the sound is just perfect! And when Oggvorbis-support comes...

Best CDMP3-Payer on earth!

Big_Berny

Of course it is mistaken, headphone OUT is ANALOG!!!

How fast does the iMP-550 skip songs?

I have found that a number of CD-mp3 players are piss poor at skipping songs in a reasonable amount of time (three seconds max).

True, but many portables have a line out socket in addition to the headphone out that you can plug a 3.5mm <-> 2 RCA jack to connect to your stereo. Usually this has a fixed output level and the EQ and DSP do not affect it.

The iMP-550 has such a socket with the label "Optical/Line Out". From it I wrongly assumed it only did optical, but it does analog out as well.

One point to note: the output level can be changed by the volume control, unlike other players.

Edit: Changed quote date and time to ISO 8601 format.

When manually skipping from track n to n+1 - about 0.5 seconds or less. Else there is only a very short pause [~0.1 sec] between tracks, similar to Winamp's behaviour.

Also, skipping from the first MP3 to the last one on the disc takes about 5-7 seconds.

Edit: clarified points. Changed quote date and time to ISO 8601 format.

Do you mean the gaps between the songs? They are very short I think. You almost can't hear them (<0.1sec)

Big_Berny

I have the original riovolt/imp-100. skipping songs varies. Gaps between sequential tracks is trivially short since they started pre-fetching. Hitting the "skip ahead" key is reasonably fast (I don't have a figure handy) on CDR's.. On CD-RW packet disks, the data iis more fragmented so finding the next track can take a few seconds.

I can't testify how that relates to the 550, but it should be at least as good on all counts, and
the CDRW may still be an issue.

All I can See in the website is OPTICAL LINE OUT for the player....

btw iRiver and comes from korea ... and so do I!

I got the iMP-550 for my birthday, one day after this thread was started. You guys must have influenced me.

How do you actually make the gaps between songs almost inaudible? I had used the 'Fix mp3 header' function in Foobar, but the gaps were still like, half a second long, and quite audible. I realise that the 550 may well does not support the LAME header gapless mp3 fix, since it was implmented only fairly recently and only by FB2K, so is there actually a way to do this for a portable?

I find battery life reasonable, 24 hours with the rechargeable batteries should be good for up to a week (3-4 hours a day) (as stated on their website), assuming the XtremeEQ, backlighting and other frills are used sparingly. Would iRiver actually start selling Lithium-ion batteries for the iMP series anytime soon?

Last thing... Would it be better (for sound quality) to plug ear/headphones into the headphone out or the line out? Or am I just damn noob in asking this?

Edit: really last thing. Does anyone know of a CD player holder that fits the 550 nicely and completely, and has holes for all the possible ports on it? The one that came with the player by default exposes some parts of the player blatantly, and I don't want scratches on it just yet.

Funny, cos I got it for the same reason

My 550 plays almost inaudible gaps. The MP3s are encoded with LAME 3.90 or higher [mostly 3.90.2] - have you upgraded the firmware to v1.20?

• iMP-550 firmware download page
  
  
  
• How to upgrade the iMP-550's firmware
  
  

BTW the gapless info was stored since LAME 3.90, so that's a couple of years by now. I'm sure a future firmware revision could handle this, if they had the incentive to.

I find it sounds better when the headphones are plugged into the headphone out. Also, the Xtreme EQ, 3D modes etc. don't affect the line out signal [but the volume control does.]

Can't wait for the Ogg Vorbis update! B)

Edit: Added links. Changed quote date and time to ISO 8601 format.

unfortunatly v1.20 (and let's hope not future versions) have pretty big problems with replaygain tags.
check out http://www.iriver.com/community/discussion...MP-550&p_group=

First thing I did was to upgrade the firmware.
I guess I have to experiment with settings a bit more then, although now gapless playback is not a nagging requirement.

I skipped all that potential problems with APEv2 tags by transcoding mpc files to mp3 files using FB2K's commandline encoder and selecting to use ID3v1 tags only. In fact, I turned off tag reading in my player because that was recommended in extending battery life, and my files were already named properly.

I plan to buy an iRiver IHP-120 sometime in late January or early February. The basic problem is that they are too expensive. Besides, warranty costs more. Is there any chance of the prices falling sometime around January?

I think the Christmas buying season should drop the price by about $100 or so. But that's just a pure conjecture.

Hi MxxCon,

I'm happy to inform you that this has been fixed with a new firmware update [1.40 beta] - all my APEv2 + ID3V1 MP3s now display the correct tag info.

iMP-550 firmware 1.40 beta [EU]

Thanks, iRiver!

Firmware beta versions have been updated with final versions.
iRiver firmware downloads