Hi,

I was wondering what is the difference in power consumption of portable audio players, in case when they are playing the music from memory, versus the case where the music is stored to hard disc? I know there is lots of variables that can affect this, including the codec type and the compression ratio of the music, type of the hard disc, type of the processor etc. I guess it is likely for the HD-based player to consume more in any case, and lose by lowest margin when the compression ratio is very high (not much data to fetch, a lot of computation required to decode).

Anyone have any ideas where to find some actual figures, real or simulated?