Zen Vs iPod

I have a creative MP3 player which is fab although it ain't the Zen. My friend has had 2 ipods break in 2 years. Also you have to use the apple software and if you buy a tune you can't use it with anything other than an iPod. So from what I've heard, go for the zen. jude "Cacoethes scribendi" http://www.judesworld.net

The Archos is a far better piece of equipment in many ways.

I've got a 20GB zen touch, about three or four generations behind the one you're looking at, which I've had for about two years. It's got very long battery life between recharges and plays stuff with no bother. Creative things are good in my experience. Cheers, Mark

I used to work for creative and in many ways the zen is much better than the ipod (you can replace the battery being the most important). Personally I'd buy an archos though. If your daughter already has music bought off itunes then she won't be able to play it on anything other than an ipod.

I wouldn't buy any. It's terrible that bands go to such time and expense to master their tracks to a high digital or analogue quality, source and commision artwork, etc...then kids go and download extremely compressed, poor quality mp3's of the internet. How they gonna appreciate sound when they're listening to what should have been a polished, 30mb track, squashed into a 2mb piece of kak? I ask thee? There is no dynamics left in an ipod mp3...and those headphones they listen to the music through...ugh, cmon. convenience music. There's nothing more mind-teasing than the incomprehensible eagerly avowed - Dennett

Have had three Creatives. Loved 'em all. The second one committed hari kari after just over a year though, which was a bit annoying. It locked up saying "Hard disk problem". I bought a new hard drive for £40 and installed it. Needless to say, the hard drive wasn't the problem. Still haven't got round to flogging that hard drive on ebay...anyone wanna make an offer? Anyway, now have the zen vision m 30g, and it's a seriously groovy piece of kit. Survived a pretty big fall without a case too. Warning: the lead to watch video through your TV is £15 extra. I got one for eight quid off some chancers making them to the same specs on ebay -- but it's an unexpected expense.

Ahh, but Yan, if you can produce music that even sounds good on a tinny iPod, then you know you must be doing something right...! ... n'est-ce pas? pe ps oid ... What is "The Art of Tea"? ... (www.pepsoid.wordpress.com)

There is no music that sounds good on tinny ipod, mr. soid, because all the dynamics are squashied out of it. It's no frills music for a generation who believe they're bang-on cool and into music for owning a piece of tat that puts even the 80's walkman in a good light. There is only one group of people who benefit from 'no frills, fast music' - and it isn't the hard working artist who has to live with their craft being treated like a quick scoff at a maccy d's. There's nothing more mind-teasing than the incomprehensible eagerly avowed - Dennett

no, it's the hard working engineer churning out ever shinier looking devices. I'd be interested to know if you could spot the difference between a high quality MP3 and a digital recording in a blind test. I know I can't.

Neither can he, as usual he's talking crap.

I agree. An Ipod is a music SOURCE. Digital music sources are definitely better quality sources than records and tapes ; CDs are very similar. What really makes the sound quality is the amp and speakers you're plugging the Ipod into. Or the quality of the headphones if that's what you're using. Differences of quality amongst sources are subtle to say the least, but a 128 MP3 on any player or computer is about as nice a starting point as you can get. The rest is up to your budget.

I was, of course, being Devil's Advocate... ;-) Having dabbled myself in the strange and complex world of digital music making, I can confirm that there most certainly is a discernable difference in quality between raw sound files and MP3's (and the like) - of course, as per SP's comment, the detectability of such does depend on the quality of one's equipment. Venturing once more into the arena of the advocacy of Mr S.A.Tan Esq... Are you therefore saying, Mr Yan, that there is no value in aiming to produce music which is accessible by those who perhaps only have access to cheap and therefore lower quality audio equipment? pe ps oid ... What is "The Art of Tea"? ... (www.pepsoid.wordpress.com)

As usual, the haemorrhoid is wrong. He may have 'dabbled' in digital music but dabbling isn't where it's at. Mp3 encoding uses several devices to reduce file sizes, the main one being to leave out all the frequencies above and below human hearing levels. Those sounds you wouldn't hear anyway so their exclusion has no effect on what you hear. There are other devices used such as substituting repeated sections of music with a smaller code. There are plenty of websites explaining the details, but here's a small section from one of them. * Since audio is being compressed, and the compression schemes are lossy, people think MP3 is inferior to what they call 'CD-quality'. That is complete nonsense; Let's check out the CD-audio format, it can only run 16 bit audio at 44.1 kHz samplerate, while one can create MP3 out of 96 kHz samplerate audio-files with 24 bit resolution. Also, dynamic range and signal-to-noise ratio inside MP3 are determined by the source-audio and can in theory be infinite, while that of an audio-CD can only be as high as the quality of the DA converter you use, which these days is usually of lower quality than when played directly from MP3 using a pro or semi-pro soundcard in a PC. Compressed audio in the form of MP3 can very well be used 'professionally', as long as you use a high enough bitrate and know what you're doing. We challenge each of you readers to do the test yourselves; Make sure you have a high quality original audio file (WAV/AIFF), encode a good MP3 out of it using -V1 --vbr-new -b112 --lowpass 21 -q0 for example, then decode the MP3 back to a WAV with a new name. Let someone else rename and datestamp both the original WAV and the new one. Now try and guess which one is the original. The best ears out there will guess wrong half the time. *

Talk about digital..ha! Most production facilities still mix-down to analogue, AND master using analogue plugs before dithering...simply because digital is crap - except for technophile bedroom bores beating out dodgy 4 to the floor. Sound quality and 'dynamics' are two completely different things, mississhitti...stay in your corner...as listener, and let us in the know educate you! MP3, in 'da business' is what's known as a 'lossy' data-compression technique -so-called because a certain amount of the original data is removed and lost forever during compression- and consequently it is inevitable that an MP3 is never going to sound quite as good as the PCM source from which it was created. It's a full-time business for musicians and producers to attempt to make the most of lossy media by employing new production/dithering techniques. wake up... There's nothing more mind-teasing than the incomprehensible eagerly avowed - Dennett

* .. Most production facilities still mix-down to analogue, AND master using analogue plugs before dithering...simply because digital is crap - except for technophile bedroom bores beating out dodgy 4 to the floor. ..* More garbage from the genius! As some of you know, I have friends in Nashville that own a highly respected recording studio, and I also know several other studios in Nashville. These studios are used by the likes of Dolly Parton, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and many stars of equal standing. I can assure you that they ALL use digital recording techniques from start to finish. The most popular systems used are industry standards, Pro Tools and Radar. I know one studio that maintains an analogue capability because every now and then someone gets hooked on the analogue sound. That studio doesn't even keep analogue tape in stock, and has to order it specially when needed. Those are the facts and are reflected throughout the recording industry.

Well I won't argue that digital is better than analogue, a sound wave is essentially analogue by nature, but as nobody but a few cranks and Neil Young record and master in analogue these days (the letters AAA on your vinyl label, or AAD on your CD label) and virtually nobody even releases music on a non-digitally recorded medium (i.e. not a CD), it's a moot point. Once something has been transferred to digital at any point during the process, any potential benefit (and it is arguable if there is any, but some people claim to hear it) is lost. Everything you said about lossy compression Missy answered quite well, the bits that are thrown away are the bits you can't hear anyway.