A Review of Sandisk’s portable music players – Then and Now

[h264]

 

Honestly, we’ve all been (or still are), shall we say, challenged on a basis of capital (in English: broke!).  Back when the CD players (remember those? Skips and all?) we were “lugging around” were starting to look old and worn and the “mp3” player was the new, cool, kid on the block and about to make Dr. Fraunhofer’s new intellectual property holding foundation some serious cash in licensing fees, we stared at $200 magic boxes that promised the ability to turn the abominations of excuses for good mp3 encoding we downloaded off Napster into a portable listening experience, but, *gasp*, without a physical disc.  I still remember in 2000, CDs were stolen daily from kids by others desperate to listen to the new Metallica or Nirvana album.  It was becoming an epidemic, and then, all of the sudden, it stopped entirely the moment a single kid got his hands on a new computer with a CD recorder for Christmas.  1000s of cheap CD-Rs later, the school was infested with copy after perfect digital copy of CDs all the kids used to have to pay $15 apiece (or steal) to obtain.  Six months later, Napster made it even easier.  So when the mp3 player became cheap, not much changed except the size of the item you had to lug around, but that was a big deal in its own right. By 2005, you could carry 15-20 albums inside your pocket and not just in your backpack.  Thanks to flash storage, you could RUN with your music too without the CD skipping.  I think people take for granted sometimes just how far, and how small, we’ve come.

 

The slightly larger player on the far left is actually a Sansa e130, a 512MB mp3 player with an optional SD card slot I bought sometime around 2005 or 2006 (I really don’t remember).  It takes a single AAA battery and features a nifty volume wheel that I honestly wish newer mp3 players would think to include.  I think Sandisk’s lead devices designer is left-handed, because as you’ll note, all the devices in this review are easiest to operate with your left hand.  This is also the last of the “Sansa” line to include a hardware hold switch on the left side.  I guess people were more upset when they couldn’t turn it on after they accidentally left the hold switch on.  This player measures pretty well for a device of its age.  At half volume it outputs 18.9mV into 100 Ohms and gets plenty loud with both my Beyerdynamic “COPs” and my Etymotic ER-4p headphones.  The output impedance is a pretty good 3.149 Ohms with a 1 KHz test signal.  Where it falls short is the DAC, which for the lack of a better word, is awful, and outputs cracks, pops, and other audible noise.  Maybe this was to bring the listener into their new-fangled mp3 player gently and preserve some of the imperfections they were used to, or maybe it was just cheap.  I’m going to go with cheap.  Sandisk was using its new storage technology to push some simple devices that could use it, and thus make you buy the SD card to expand the storage.

 

There were some e200s before Sansa abandoned the “e” moniker and batteries altogether and created the Sansa Clip and Fuze.  The Fuze gets its name from … I don’t know … electrical fuses?  The Clip is so named because of the large lapel clip that adorns the back that’s supposed to make it easy to clip to … I’m not sure what.  I’ve tried clipping it to a lot of things, but only my button down shirts I wear to work make any sense so far.  I guess Sansa’s designer is a lefty with a pocket protector.  Imagine that.

 

Next in line is the next version of the Sansa line, the clip+.  Why the +, you ask?  Simply put, they added a microSD slot and a home button so you could actually look at the menu while the music was playing.  The Sansa clip+ hits a very special spot in the PMP market.  It’s small, very cheap, and measures VERY well.  Mine delivers 19.8 mV into 100 Ohms at half volume and has an amazing output impedance of 1.6 Ohms at 1 Khz.  It’s the only music device I have, including my ODAC, that doesn’t have audible hiss at normal listening volumes with my Etymotics ER-4p, and hardly any at max volume.  It’s been extensively measured, and currently still sits atop anythingbutipod’s editor’s choice list 3 years on.  I’ve used this one with a 32GB microSD card for about 2 years now while I take my weekly plane ride to work.  Now that the FAA rules regarding electronic devices have changed, I don’t have to trick the flight attendant by hiding it in my shirt pocket anymore, but it was very useful for that until recently.  I’m still waiting for some bigger microSD card sizes so I can stuff my whole music collection into that tiny thing, but other than that I have very few complaints about this little sucker.

 

It was widely believed that the Clip+ was a sort of happy accident by many, so when Sandisk released the Clip Zip there was a lot of cautious optimism that it might either be about the same or just fall flat on its face.  Thankfully, I’m happy to report this PMP performs identically to its previous iteration.  Its major upgrade, a color display, allows you to even display album art like much fancier players.  With the Rockbox firmware installed, I can even charge and sync with the player in the Rockbox firmware.  Another major change is the charging/syncing port is now a micro USB jack instead of a mini USB jack (Linus would be pissed).  My personal experience with USB in general is I’ve never had a problem with any sort of USB jack, and I suspect you’d have to force a plug onto the jack to really risk breaking it.  The move makes it compliant with the European standard that requires micro USB for charge ports.

 

In closing, these are my most trusted portable media players and the standard for which I compare everything else.  When you’re out and about, the last thing you need is to fiddle with more silly menus and spend time converting files to put on the player before you leave.  These players deliver that usability with flying colors, and I only have to charge them about once a month in order to keep them well charged.  Fancy DACs and powerful amplifiers don’t really matter much in this environment if you can’t even play music through them, so a 16/44.1 DAC chip doesn’t hurt you much if you have a light, pocketable, and very intuitive user interface like the Sansa line.

 

Minority Report:  Some worthless, cheap, obnoxiously tiny mp3 players somebody at Sandisk should have aborted to save face. Don’t buy them!  I mean, they can’t be any good, they’re only $40!  Everyone knows cheap audio equipment sucks.  After all, you get what you pay for, and big and pricey is where it’s at.

[Benjio]

Just ordered a Clip Zip a week or so ago (not opening it until Christmas), so I'm hoping it's as good as everyone says they are, I've only heard good things. And very nice overview by the way, hopefully it helps some people who don't know much about portable audio.

[mrsocksman]

The Sansa Fuze with Rockbox on it is the best thing I've ever experienced. Wish I had some extra cash so I could buy another one. I lost my old one.

[Askew]

Dat minority report.

[Tycho]

I have the Sansa Clip + with 4GB internal storage, i just put in a 32GB µSD card and it works like a charm. This thing easily lasts for 9 hours of playback, I've been using it almost daily for a year and have had no problems yet. BEST MONEY WELL SPENT EVER

[ManWithBeard1990]

I wish I had read this earlier and not spent my money on a Lenco player instead.

[KnightlyBackUps]

Just recently managed to get my hands on a Sansa Fuze (the normal one, not the "+") after my Clip zip died.

I'm expecting a great deal, (even second hand). 

 

But it's a shame that the mainstream mp3 buyers at that time (2004 - 2011 like), really never saw all the things SanDisk was offering with their line up of mp3 players: great format support for WMA, OGG, FLAC etc.+ RockBox (although that's actually no ones credit except the ppl from Rockbox themselves) + SD card expandability. I mean, when I (on the rare occasion that I do) talk to people about a mp3 player that has an SD card slot so you can ADD MEMORY AS YOU LIKE

they're absolutely speechless, even more so when I tell them those were already around as early as 2006.

 

What happened back then (2004 - 2011) the mass majority of people got totally blindsighted by Apple and their (obviously good looking, sleek design and all that)

Ipods which were insanely priced, vastly inferior in capacity* (in 2006 they didn't even make higher capacities thn 4 GB, *other thn the classic lineup who just had a freakin' Hard Drive and were just waiting to be dropped 1x and die) and ofcourse the tyranny of the AAC format.

 

That's why, because of that 'monopoly', I think that alot of good mp3 players got pushed out of the market, 'cause people barely knew anything but Ipod and even if they did, they wanted to be 'cool' and just bought it anyway.

 

But things are changing now and for the better I think...because of the fact that almost every cellphone has an SD card slot the majority of users (understandably) sees no point in buying a seperate audio player (including Ipod) and the few audio players that are being released now are much more focussed on the few people who actually care what they buy (care about supported formats, memory expandability, user interface, flash over HD memory) and therefor the industry makes better products.

 

Only thing, and this is my point, is that it's a shame that's it's only just happening so recently and that we could've been a lot further if the right brands (like SanDisk and others) would've been supported for the great products that they made and make.

[Mo5]

Is anyone still using dedicated MP3 players. I thought everybody switched to using their phones :unsure: