Hey everyone.

I am looking to replace my oldish Mp3 player, an Archos AV500, soon. The most important feature/spec will obviously have to be sound quality and file format support. Onboard audio settings (equalizers and such) are not important as I will be using the player in my really high quality aftermarket car sound system.

I am looking currently at the Archos 605wifi, Cowon A3 or QW5, and the Apple iPhone/iPod touch.
I have heard that the Archos is bad this generation, although I am very happy with my AV500- I have heard good things about Cowon, except they use a full windows OS which is slow and clunky, and the Apple might have bad audio depending on the source read. However, most of the reviews I read talk about audio quality only regarding the included earphones, which are terrible no matter what player you buy, so I don't know how to judge these things.

I am open to other suggestions, of course. Other nice features would be a nice large touch screen and other programs such as contacts and a calendar and stuff. mostly, I am here to discuss audio quality though.

Also, somewhat related- can you give me a recommendation of really good earphones that reproduce sound extremely well- including bass? Hopefully noise canceling, but that is not necessary.

If anyone is an expert, can you tell me about jailbreaking an iPhone? I know you can use ridiculously cool 3rd party programs, from useful everyday widgets to full N64 game emulators, but have they found a way to make the computer recognize the iPhone as an external HDD for drag and drop music addition (I hate iTunes) and have they found a way for the thing to recognize nonApple formats. I usually use Mp3 (for pirated music I don't really care about) and Windows lossless for my ripped CD's and such. I would really like to not have to do file transformations and itunes.

Also, forgot to mention- is there any real difference between using WMA lossless and Flac or another alternative?

I can't give you any specific recommendations, but I have a few general opinions...

The sound quality won't vary as much from player-to-player when you plug it into a high impedance input. With this set-up, the most important consideration is probably the noise spec. (I would expect distortion and frequency-response to be "good enough" with any decent player.) When driving headphones/earphones the quality of the output amplifier is much more important.

There is no difference in sound quality. Lossless means that the decoded data is identical to the uncompressed data, like a compressed ZIP file. (I think they all have a compression ratio in the ballpark of 60%.) The main consideration is that the player be able to decode the particular format. It think the only lossless format the iPod and iPhone can decode is Apple Lossless (unless you figure-out how to hack your iPhone). All portable players (almost?) can play MP3. For other formats, you just have to check the specs.

In "defense" of MP3... A high-bitrate MP3 should be transparent (sound the same as an uncompressed file), it will play on any player, and the file will be smaller than a lossless file (~1/3 of the FLAC size, depending on the bitrate). A lot of people keep a lossless archive on their computer, and use MP3 for their portable player.

I'd like to put in a vote for Cowon. As for the interface, you don't HAVE to use that. Unlike the iPod or iPhone, you won't be stuck having to use the crappy managment software to manage your player (at least, not unless you have a lot of DRMed music, but then often you may have to use WMP for that on a non-Apple player anyway. Just stay away from DRM anyway since it sucks.) Most modern MP3 players are UMS compatible and support drag and drop right off. Just plug in the player, look at it in your file manage and drop the files wherever you want them on there. (And the advantage to this is that UMS is pretty much compatible with everything even semi-modern. Linux from late or maybe even mid 2.4x kernels and I think maybe even all 2.6x kernels supports it right off -- basically, if you have updated your distro and/or kernel anytime in the past eight years or so you're probably alright. If you can plug in a thumb drive, you can plug in a modern MP3 player.) I suggest creating folders to manage it all by splitting things up (you can even go the iPod route of seperating by artist album and etc, though personally I like to mix and match so much that I split more by order of preference.) You don't even have to do that if you don't want to though. As for the U3, well, it is perfection for its class of player. I can imagine nothing I would change about it. Even the storage issue was solved with a 4GB model coming out shortly after I bought my 2GB (just to screw with my head, lol. But 2GB still fits practically everything I truly enjoy anyway.)

I don't know much about the A3 mind you. I can tell you about the U3 and the D2 though. Each are great in their own ways. The D2's interface probably isn't ideal but otherwise the player is absolutely wonderful with a great little processor, great battery lifetime, and even a wonderful screen (which comes in handy with the fact that it can pull off videos really well IMO. It did bug me the first time I looked at a picture and realized that the screen on my D2 is many times better quality than that of my rather expensive PDA though, lol.) Generally speaking, Cowon seems to be really serious about quality using really high quality DAC/ADC and etc in their hardware as well as offering quite a few features out of the box (such as support for FLAC and OGG Vorbis.)


DVDDoug has the basic gist of it. Lossless is lossless. There is a bit to add though. Firstly, proprietary compressions are less compatible overall and lest trustworthy for the main purpose of using lossless to begin with (namely archiving.) That's why I stay well away from the likes of WMA lossless and Apple's lossless (I forget the extention of it off the top of my head.) Though there are attempts at freeware decoders for these, they are anything but perfect and more worryingly is the absolute control those two companies have over their proprietary codecs that allows them to decide to break standards someday just so they can add DRM or charge an extra license or something (and who knows, someday with the obsessive laws we are getting they may manage to make it illegal to use free decoders...) With the possibility of someday not being able to restore it 100% I just don't feel comfortable with these. Since it's lossless anyway, I see no reason not just use the open source FLAC. There's no difference between them except that one is open, so why not? (Also, FLAC is purportedly really good for decoding as far as processing power is concerned.)

That said, I mostly just use FLAC for archiving and the only FLAC files I keep on my player are from things that came from a lossy source (such as a recording from a game with no OST for example.) I see no reason to loose quality twice in a row with my player supporting lossless compression. Bear in mind that if you go crazy and start dumping absolutely everything you can in lossless onto your player you will fill it up pretty quickly. Few formats are truly good at compressing and most of those that are are either too processor intensive to decode or just plain not well supported (in the end FLAC is practically the only open source codec I see in use on commercial players really due to this.)


EDIT: BTW, on the headphones/earphones, by all that I've heard I'd say stay well away from noise cancelling. Find some good IEMs and you won't have to worry since they are noise blocking by their very nature anyway.

Sennheiser do some nice ones -- they frequently come up in discussions here. Try googling:

sennheiser site:.hydrogenaudio.org



I'm not, but I can tell you a little. AFAIK, they've used various methods to get into it. One was via a tiff library exploit that Safari was vulnerable to. And immediately you'll see the problem here: the vendor can't leave holes like that unpatched, since they could also be used by third-parties for malicious purposes. So sooner or later the method will be no longer available, and the jailbreakers have to find another. I suppose if you broke into an iPhone via whatever was the current method, you could avoid applying security patches. But is that wise, since while you've left a gate in for yourself, you've also left one open for malfeasants?

There's a related problem: if you hack the device and do update the software, the device might stop working. There were fairly lurid new headlines about Apple's deliberately "bricking" jailbroken iPhones with updates. That's an overexcited press for you. (Actually one suspects Apple may not mind the unofficial modding too much -- it's not as if many people do it, and it does add to the buzz around the device.) However, while they wouldn't be trying to do it, neither is it likely they'd be testing against jailbroken phones to ensure it doesn't happen. AFAIK, one update "bricked" jailbroken iPhones, and one didn't. It's just a roll of the dice. It's not unlike the situation where you update a PC from Windows 98 to XP or a Mac from Tiger to Leopard (Logitech mouse drivers anyone?) and risk the OS getting borked, because some piece of third-party software on there has done something unexpected and/or unwise to the system.

Anyway, Erica Sadun would be a reliable source of information, if you wanted to know more

http://ericasadun.com/



They can move files and off. But adding files manually, as opposed to synching via iTunes, seems like trying to make life harder for oneself, so I'd doubt anyone's spent much time on that. I think what they're probably more interested in is adding Unix utilities. But I don't know.

The only format specific to Apple anyone's likely to play on an iPhone is Apple Lossless* (and lossless formats are a poor choice for a portable device anyway). iTunes will play standard MPEG formats -- MP3 and AAC. Again, I doubt anyone's spent time on that: they've no incentive to hack support in for other formats, if they can play their MP3s, as you've always been able to with iTunes.


* I guess AIFF is theirs, too (although SGI also used a version of it) but no-one's going to use that on a phone.