- #WHAT HAPPENED TO CREATIVE ZEN MP3 PLAYERS PORTABLE#
- #WHAT HAPPENED TO CREATIVE ZEN MP3 PLAYERS ANDROID#
- #WHAT HAPPENED TO CREATIVE ZEN MP3 PLAYERS SOFTWARE#
Also there's a reason why a lot of these players are based off some sort of Android thing with bits and pieces replaced. I already know exactly what you mean, still doesn't change the fact that the mp3 player market exists and is morphing very quickly to the audiophile market.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO CREATIVE ZEN MP3 PLAYERS PORTABLE#
Its just some cheap reference design meant for a no-brand tablet or PMP with one of their portable amp circuits bolted on and you can tell.
#WHAT HAPPENED TO CREATIVE ZEN MP3 PLAYERS SOFTWARE#
Take a look at the software or battery life on a Fiio (who are one of the few respectable companies in that market) and you'll see what I mean. So small volumes mean massive per unit prices - or really substandard designs. Same also for analog layout and board design. Things like software development are 100% fixed cost, zero marginal cost. Yeah, but unlike relatively simple devices like tube amps, economies of scale matter a hell of a lot more for what are basically portable computers. Besides Sony, iRiver/Astell&Kern seems to be doing particularly well at that business too.
But that's not the question at hand - which was whether there are still dedicated mp3 players being made, which the answer is "yes" and is a indisputable fact, and a somewhat booming market at that in a particular segment (niche, audiophile part) of the market. No doubt that the majority of them are very likely garbage. Maybe Sony and a couple others still releasing new products and some older stuff thats still on the market (sandisk, although they were never really all that high quality, just very solid for what you paid and easily hackable). If you want to compare something to iPod quality, theres not all that much. Just cheap Chinese reference designs stuck into a big heavy box to appeal to idiots. Yeah, but the vast majority of those are absolute garbage. In fact there's a notable increase in "audiophile grade" mp3 players - devices that easily sell for at least the price of a flagship smartphone if not more - in recent years, a segment of the market which didn't really exist during the peak of the iPod days. Sony, Fiio, iRiver/Astel&Kern, Cowon, HiFiMan just to name a few. And that might be something that the OP may want to consider as a factor if they so choose. I'm not saying that one is strictly better than the other - that's for the user to decide - but still there's an appreciable difference between most modern smartphone-like devices (including that weird hazy grey area phablet category) and a dedicated MP3 player.
Source files being the same, the difference is also noticeable between an unequalized Cowon X9 and my Galaxy S3. Same headphones, same amp, same FLAC file on my microSD card, same app. At least from my experience, the 747M Galaxy S3 that I have sounds "hollow" and recessed. It's not like it's as though you're listening to music above water and then under water, but it's there. They use different DACs, and the difference is indeed audible using ATH-M50. There is a pretty noticeable difference between the "North American" 747M S3 and the international i9300 S3. You won't see that kind of difference between modern phones though, unless you're looking at dirt cheap generic chinese players, so I wouldn't worry too much. The S3 is a little better than typical cowon devices like the D2 or J3, but the difference shouldn't be huge. Compared to the amp, the DAC is basically irrelevant. Its not the DAC that matters, its the amp. Listening to the same track on my Cowon and my Samsung Galaxy S3 is like night and day, even with the same headphones and amp. It has a processor, maybe even a co-processor, to take care of audio and the UI, and usually a very good DAC to go along with it.įor those that care about things like this, among many other factors, a proper MP3 player makes a world of difference. A good MP3 player doesn't need a quad core processor and 4GB of running memory. More Android offerings have been getting better and better, but most still don't quite reach Apple's average level of "very good" all around. The iPhones in general excel in this area. Overall audio/sound quality is a large factor as well. So depending on how much battery is left at the end of the day when you plug in, as long as you're above 25%, you should have enough battery to play audio throughout that entire time. Is it really worth the additional cost for the new MP3 player and the hassle of managing music separately (granted, you already do that), just to save a few percent of battery life on your phone?Ī quick analysis of audio battery life on phones is ~3x longer when playing audio vs.
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