I want to buy a DAP. I looked at the "normal" offerings with Flash and HDD and I haven't been much impressed.

I was browsing the equivalent of a Best Buy here in Canada (Future Shop) and noticed they sell the PSP Gigapack for 340$CND. To put things in perspective, they also sell the the 4GB iPod Nano 300$CND, the 5GB iRiver H10 270$CND and the Archos Gmini 402 330$CND.

I am very interested in the fact that with the PSP using a 2.xx firmware it is possible to use a web browser over 802.11b. Plus, the PSP has the biggest screen, and a beautiful one at that. The Gigapack contains a 1GB MemoryStick. It seems to be a pretty good deal.

Though, what I wanted in the first place was a DAP for MP3 playback. Anyone here can tell me if the lineout of the PSP is of more than acceptable quality?

Otherwise, I think I will go with the Gmini 402. 20GB instead of 1GB (vs. the PSP) and very good video playback (though, I think the screen is rather small).

What would you do?

p.s.: I saw a similar thread over at head-fi.org but I simply don't trust these people. They can see stereo separation and "chocolate bass" and coloured mids out of DAPs... oh, and it seems they have the concensus that anything but FLAC is crap for portable playback.

No one will give you a definite answer to that question so you should trust your own ears only ... take some LAME VBR MP3 files to a local retailer and make him put them on a memory stick ... then carefully listen to the PSP with your headphones of choice.




... now that sounds familiar ...

I'm still using firmware 1.5 and it plays Lame 3.97b1 APS files just fine. I've been thinking of going to 2.0 to test out the AAC support, but I just haven't done it yet. If you're only getting it for DAP functionality, then I'd say it's fairly bulky to carry around. If you want it for video as well, then the screen is just awesome for that. Not being able to encode movies to the native screen resolution kinda of sucks, but i'm still impressed with the quality.

Back to the audio, I'm no golden ear'd person, but I find that I'll leave my iPod shuffle at home if I'm taking my PSP with me. To my ears (please listen to one yourself first) both the iPod and PSP sound just fine through some decent 'phones.

If I didn't know any better, I would say it sounds like synesthesia to me. I'm used to having music taste of various things and seeing colours to sound, however I don't usually talk about it.

Maybe it's different for 'audiophiles'.

Anyways, I shouldn't hijack the thread. I can't really help you with your question, beyond agreeing with what JeanLuc said.

I have been using this as a dap for awhile. I have never owned anything besides a palm/pocket pc for mp3 listening so I can't tell you how it would compare to, say an ipod. I don't use headphones alot but I do play it on my truck stereo through a tape adapter. I have compared the lame mp3 (newer version but not the newest-not at home so I can't check) APS setting on PSP to the actual cd and they sound very close if you crank the volume up to almost max on the PSP. I don't think I have golden ears, but tiny little differences do drive me INSANE. There are only 4 or 5 presets to use and are pretty diverse. I like the "unique" one and it sounds pretty good to me. Some may not like the limited choice. I am using the 2.6 firmware for wma support. I was transcoding from lame APS to atrac3plus 128 kbps to save space but I have been having an issue with sonicstage 3.3 corrupting some of the songs. I didn't have this problem with 3.2, which is actually why I was surfing this board. I decided to try dbpoweramp with wma 9.1 at quality 75 and so far no problems and pretty similar in quality and size, but honestly I think I liked atrac3plus a little better. I would prefer AAC but you have to rename the files from .m4a to .mp4 to get them to work and alot of the file info does not display. Obviously space is at a premium with memory sticks but I have a 512 and fit all my save games along with about 7-8 albums (no video) and they sound pretty good but not perfect obviously (very acceptable, though). Also, navigation is only one folder deep so you can basically copy the folder name (album) but you would have to change the name to get the artist in there and that is a pain for each individual artist. Loading music can be drag and drop and there is not out of the box sync solution. I will say if you are looking for a games first device that does mp3 as well, it's pretty nice. I also do like the web browser pretty well and use it quite often to stay off the computer. Obviously, I am not a purist because I transcode and will tell you what I think sounds "acceptable".

Also consider PSPRadio that is an MP3 stream client for the PSP.

https://developer.berlios.de/projects/pspradio/

It's a feature that you can't find in another DAP.

so...does the PSP support HE-AAC or only LC-AAC?

Only LC-AAC. I tried encoding a HE-AAC file and putting it on my PSP last night (i have firmware 2.60, latest) and it just said "Unsupported data".

Personally i'm transcoding my music files on the PSP with Foobar2000 and LAME 3.97b2 -V6 --vbr-new (110-130kbps vbr with decent enough quality for portable usage for me).