Portable Players?

[richidoo]

What's the best portable player available right now?  My Creative Jukebox 3 is wearing out.

I am looking at the Cowan J3 (32GB.) It supposedly has good sound quality, nice screen, FM radio, flac, and strongish internal amp. Never bought from Cowan before.

I heard the hifiman player last summer. Sounds good, but clunky and expensive.

Any other recs?

My wife has iPod g5, lousy sound compared to my old Creative Jukebox3. Doesn't play flac either, so Apple is out.

[Carlman]

I still have and use my Cowan (m5?) and the only major issue I've had is a non-user-replaceable battery.. which of course, I replaced.   But it was a real pain.  Other minor issues:  Mine is hard drive based and you can hear spin up and down if you're using it as a source for powered speakers playing light background music in an otherwise silent setting... It won't be an issue with headphones or whatever.  Lastly, it is a little heavy.  I don't foresee using it for more activity than walking.  Keep in mind my player is years old.. technology has likely helped this player.

Audio quality is pretty good but I don't have a lot of other references.  Every mp3 player or other portable has done nothing for me in that regard.. partly because I have no clue about headphones... I have bought a few that are better than the free ones.. and haven't really had an aha moment with portable devices and/or headphones.  The Sennheiser PX200's looked like a good option... but I don't know.

-C

[richidoo]

Thanks Carl!

J3 has Li-poly batteries so they should last a long time. I like that it can play 64 hours of music per charge. It is about 1/4 the size of my current player. It is all solid state memory, up to 64GB.

I'm glad to hear that your Cowon has survived for a while.

Maybe the Easter Bunny will come through for me. 

[manaox2]

The hifiman products have a really good reputation right now, but  completely agree they are a bit pricy and bulky for me as well.

I've been impressed by the poweramp app coupled with my droid X. I never would have thought a smartphone could sound so good. Pandora and all the other possibilities for streaming my music and video library surely don't hurt either, this is the direction portable players should be heading in my opinion.

[richidoo]

http://powerampapp.com/

That looks cool, thanks. My wife has a spare droid, but she keeps it for Pandora and GPS.

[mdconnelly]

I use to use a Cowan U3 (I think) and flac files and was quite pleased.  It could only hold maybe a dozen albums in flac but it sounded pretty damn good for what it was.

I now use my iPhone and have been quite pleased by the SQ.  While it can't take flac, I use MediaMonkey to sync from my flac library to high-quality MP3 and it just works.   Headphones are either Senn PX100 headphones or Shure earbuds (can't remember the model).