mp3 player

Bought a Creative Zen Touch 40GB mp3 player today. I actually used to have the original Archos Jukebox (just like an iPod in functionality but about 3 years earlier), so this is a big upgrade in style and downgrade in size. Anyway, I've been preparing for 3 days now by resampling my mp3 collection down to VBR5 from 320 fixed rate so I think I may actually get most of my collection on this thing, which would be impressive.. I'm up to the G's and I'm at 10GB.. we'll see..

Anyway, the unit came partially charged. I like to make sure my first charge is to a fully discharged battery so I fired it up and listened to some of the demo music on it in an effort to run down the unit a bit. I didn't even try the crappy earbuds it came with and I hooked it up to a nice pair of Sony MDR-7506 cans and so far I'm not impressed. I can hear all kinds of artifacts and fully turned up the unit is not very loud at all. It could be due to the mp3's on the unit. We will soon see when I start bringing over my tunes.

I refuse to buy an iPod for various reasons that I won't go into. (actually, search this and my other blogs and I'm sure there will be an anti iPod rant somewhere). So, if this unit isn't performant, I may go with the smaller capacity (6GB)Rio Carbon or the 20GB iRiver H10. We'll see...