u l t r a m o o k i e

I love to listen to music — and with all this travelling I’ve been doing, I want a portable that is willing to travel with me. So, I have three contenders: Apple’s iPod, Sony’s MZ-E909, and SonicBlue’s RioVolt 250. Who’s the winner? Why? Read on to find out.

I’ve been flying back and forth across the country for the better part of the last five months. These are long flights — at least 3 and a half hours each way — so I want some music to keep me entertained. I’ve tried three different portables to do this, two are MP3 players and one is a MiniDisc player. Here’s how they stack up.

Aesthetics. Huh? You maybe scratching your head. Aesthetics? What has that got to do with a portable music player? Well, it does pay to have a nice looking player — I like the attention The two winners here are the iPod and the MZ-E909. The iPod is just a looker with its clear face, white body, and shiny metallic back. The layout is clean and it just looks like a piece of art. Picture Here. The MZ-E909 is made of a full Magnesium body and has that same clean look on the face. There is only a few dimples and a Walkman logo on the front. Very clean and visually appealling — heck, it’s so small it looks neat. Picture Here. The RioVolt 250 is nice looking, but it’s just black and grey and oh-so-boring looking. Nothing sexy about it. Picture Here.

Sound. Sound is very important to me. Yes, even with the roar of the jet engines, I listen to how good a player sounds. With all these players the sound really does depend on the encoding scheme applied. For instance with the iPod and the RioVolt 250 it depends on what bitrate you use to encode the MP3s and what quality you used. With the MZ-E909 it depends on what mode you are recoding your music. Are you using SP, MDLP2, or MDLP4? Using the very best encoding — 320Kbps on MP3s and SP on the Minidisc — the Sony MZ-E909 sounded the best. The sound was very rich with the MZ-E909, and the sound can be customized to your hearts content. With an SP recording, the MZ-E909 sounded exactly like a CD. I cannot tell the difference. The iPod runs flat at first, with pre-1.1 firmware. That flat sound was pretty darned good, but I wanted to customize it (add some more bass). With the 1.1 firmware the iPod got an equalizer, kind of. There are equalizer presets that can be chosen from. None of them are custom, but it is nice to have them. The only problem is that when they are applied, sometimes they distort the music playback, like the iPod is just trying too hard to apply that equalizer setting. The iPod comes in a close second for best sounding. With a well-encoded MP3 (with 192Kbps or greater) the iPod was indistinguishable from a CD also. In the tail end is the RioVolt 250. The sound that comes out of the RioVolt 250 just sounds a bit weird. I can’t seem to put my finger on it, but it sounds weird. The RioVolt 250 sounds very confined — like I am listening to music in a muffled chamber. Just weird I tell ya.

Portability. Hey, if I can’t take it with me, what good does it do me? The iPod is hands down the most portable player, or is it? I can carry on average 800 tunes on my iPod — a little box the size of a pack of playing cards. (4.02″ x 2.43″ 0.78″ at 6.5 oz.) Now that is cool. The Sony MZ-E909 is actually the smallest of the three players. It is also the lightest. (2.875” x 3.125” x .5” at 1.75 oz. without battery) The RioVolt 250 is the largest of all. (A little bigger than a regular CD player) The one thing that makes a difference with the tiny MZ-E909 is that to expand the music I have to take along more MDs, which in effect does make the thing larger. But as stand-alone devices go, the iPod has more tunes per square inch than the MZ-E909

Performance. The MZ-E909 wins in the performance category without even being touched by any of its competitors. With just the internal rechargeable battery the MZ-E909 can last 38 hours in SP mode, 45 hours in MDLP2, and 53 hours in MDLP4. Now, when you add the AA battery attachment you get unbelievable numbers: 60 hours in SP mode, 70 hours in MDLP2, and 83 hours in MDLP4. The iPod gets 11 hours (max) while playing 160Kbps MP3s, less if the MP3s are encoded at a higher bitrate. The RioVolt 250 gets an amazing 15 hours on its rechargeable batteries, also less if MP3s are encoded at a higher bitrate. Yup, that’s right, on the best playmode the MZ-E909 bests the other two by a matter of atleast three. Now that’s performance. With the iPod, for a long trip, I have to take along the portable charging kit — a long Firewire cable and a power connector — in order to survive the round-trip flights. With the RioVolt I’ve survived long cross-country flights. With the MZ-E909 I’m set for anything without a worry. The other performance issue is skip-protection. The iPod has an amazing 20-minutes of skip protection with its 32MB buffer — this 20-minutes is based on 160Kbps MP3s, it will be less with MP3s encoded with a higher bitrate. The RioVolt has a 8-minute buffer. The MZ-E909 has G-Protection, but Sony does not specify how long the skip protection is, only that it is “skip free.” And I can testify to the fact that the MZ-E909 and my other MD players with G-Protection never skipped no matter what kind of shaking I applied.

Other Cool Features. Other cool features are stuff that would not fit into any other category. Lets start with the RioVolt 250. The RioVolt 250 has some definite cool features. First of all, it’s the only player that I have that can play a new CD. If I’m on a trip and pick up a new CD, I can play it immediately. Now that is cool all by itself. The RioVolt 250 also comes with a remote control that has all the controls on the front face of the player. There is no LCD screen on the remote though, but a LCD version can be purchased at SonicBlue’s website. The RioVolt 250 is also the only player that has a FM tuner. If those 300 MP3s that you burned onto the CD aren’t enough, you can tune into a FM radio station and listen to tunes that way. The RioVolt 250 can also play WMA files. But who would encoded their music in that awful format? The iPod has the coolest user-interface of all of these machines. It is just simplicity. The jog-wheel on the iPod is also a damn cool feature, making finding a song so easy. Being able to use the iPod as a second harddive is also cool. And the ability to sync the iPod with my iBook is well worth it too. The Sony MZ-E909 has a remote control that does have an LCD on it — it is the main LCD for the unit. It has personal MD settings also — letting me save a specific sound setting and playmode per MD. Neat! The MZ-E909 and RioVolt 250 have unlimited expandability — I can just burn a new CD with MP3s for my RioVolt 250 and I can just record a new MD for my MZ-E909. With the iPod I’m limited to 5GB — not that 5GB is a small limit.

Drawbacks. With the iPod and RioVolt 250, I’m tied to a computer. More so with the iPod, since that’s the only way to get music onto the player. With the RioVolt 250 I can put regular music CDs in the player, but that kind of defeats the purpose of having a player that has MP3 abilities. Also, the drawback of the RioVolt 250 is that I have to have a computer with a CD-R(W) drive and software to burn CDs with. The drawback of the MZ-E909 is that the MDLP2 is a nice way of recording music, but sometimes it is a bit heavy with the compression and there are noticeable artifacts. MDLP4 compression is even worse. For SP recordings, they have to be made in real-time (want to record 80 minutes of SP music? Get ready to spend 80 minutes doing it.) Though with my NetMD recorder I can record MDLP2 and MDLP4 music much quicker — but that in turn ties me down to a computer. But, if I’m willing to record in real-time I can hook my MD recorder to any source and record in SP, MDLP2, or MDLP4.

The Winner. All three are winners. I love them all. But what I’ll be travelling with is my Sony MZ-E909 — yes, over the iPod. Why? Because of the 800 songs that I put on my iPod, I usually only listen to a select dozen, depending on what I like at the time. So, the MZ-E909 is lighter, smaller and lasts longer. I can put those songs on some MDs using my NetMD recorder (and the Simple Burner software, not that obnoxious OpenMG software). With 38 hours of listening time I don’t have to bring along anything extra for power. And although the MZ-E909 is expensive like the iPod, it’s not as expensive and it does not feel as fragile — the iPod is a harddrive inside a little box remember? The Minidisc media is cheap at $2 a piece and damn durable (requiring 180 degrees Celcius to melt it). Yes, CD-R(W) media is cheaper (at pennies a piece) but they don’t last long — though I could buy quite a few pieces of CD-R(W) media for the price of one MD, huh? But it’s also a matter of size. The size difference between CD-R(W) media and MD media is like night and day.

If you haven’t tried MD technology, it’s well worth a try — especially if you’re in the market for a portable solid state MP3 player. Expanding a MD player/recorder is much more cheaper than expanding a solid state MP3 player. Sony’s making a huge push with this new NetMD, and though I’m not so hot about that OpenMG software that is used for NetMD, I’ve come to love the other piece of software in the NetMD package: Simple Burner. Try out Sony’s MD page. One other thing, an MD player/recorder, unlike an MP3 player, is much easier to use. With MP3 players, for regular people, it’s a bit of a chore. You need to encode the MP3s then transfer — or with the RioVolt 250, burn. With a MD player/recorder, if you don’t want to interface with a computer then you don’t have to. Just hook the recorder up to your stereo system and record like you would a tape. Simple.

Thanks for reading my portable audio rant. All comments welcome. What do you use for portable audio? Do you like MP3? Do you like MD? Maybe you’re a stickler for regular audio CDs? Or maybe you’re still using audio cassettes?