New mp3 player

[p4radox]

The time has come for me to think about buying a new mp3 player. I still use my excellent 6 year old iRiver H120 but I think I'd like something a bit more modern.

I care far more about features, sound quality, and quality than looks or useability. Here's what I'm after:

>20Gb Flash
Plays FLAC
Good battery life

I've looked at the Cown S9 and it looks brilliant, does anything else compare?

 

[titaniumx3]

Sony X1060 would suit your needs perfectly except that it doesn't play FLAC.

What headphones/earphones will you be using? Are you using an external amp of any sort?

Seriously, FLAC is overkill for portable players and I'd doubt very much that you could tell the difference from well encoded, high bitrate mp3 or aac encoded files in a double blind test; it's mostly in your head.

 

[p4radox]

I currently use Sony EX85 earphones, and HD555s when at home. I also have a CMOY headphone amp but probably wouldn't bother taking with me anywhere.

I'm aware that FLAC is massive overkill, especially for portables. I can't even tell between FLAC and MP3 on my Hi-Fi. However, I'm now ripping everything to FLAC because space is cheap, and eventually I might build a system that will benefit from it and I'd rather not have to re-encode everything to mp3.

I'll check out that Sony.

 

[titaniumx3]

I'd rather not have to re-encode everything to mp3.

I have all my music archived on my PC as lossless and it only took me just over 2hrs to convert roughly 2500 songs, resulting in about 25gb of mp3s (lame encoded, V0 preset).

This was on a 3.4ghz quad-core using foobar2000 to do the encoding (uses all four cores). I'm sure there's loads of programs that can do this, but once you've got foobar2000 it's a piece of cake.

In my opinion there's absolutely no reason to use FLAC on a portable player, unless you've got some crazy setup with very, very good ears.


EDIT: Like to point out that this is in general and I'd recommend it regardless of what player you have.

 

[ojrules]

either the cowon or the Zune HD , im not sure of the specs of it but its very big in america and has some nice features, might be worth a look..