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Friday November 27, 2009 11:07 PM AEST
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Wired for sound

by Staff Writers  on Jan 1, 1900
Tags: Wired | for | sound
For those of us who don't really have a lot of money to spare there's always one payoff that you can look forward to each year and that's tax time. Which means there is the perennial question of what
For those of us who dont really have a lot of money to spare theres always one payoff that you can look forward to each year and thats tax time. Which means there is the perennial question of what to do with your income tax return.

Under the assumption that the taxpayer should see at least a hundred dollars back we thought, as luck would have it, that the money could go towards something youd really like but would not go out of your way for, and that leads us to this months Labs choice for a look at the MP3 market. Theyre typically bundled with 32Mb of RAM to store those music tracks on, use one or two AA or AAA batteries and allow limited expansion by a further 32Mb in SmartMedia or multimedia card flash memory format. Some ripping and encoding software for the host PC is included although the capabilities and quality diverge widely. Naturally there is also an interface for downloading from PC to MP3 player, usually serial or USB.

Considering the prices being asked you would baulk at calling them mainstream products, in the light of Napster and other associated copyright issues with the recording industry, there is enough diversity of product to warrant a peek at just what is available and what the features and differences are.

If your opinion is that there appears to be much of a muchness about the portable players on show then you would be correct. However, we did notice a difference in the players playback qualities which, in some cases, were remarkably bad.

From the information gleaned at Computex it seems that the feature sets of MP3 players will remain pretty much the same, although expanded memory and the inclusion of FM tuner capabilities are expected enhancements. But the best news is consumers will see some relief as it is widely accepted that flash memory prices are set to drop significantly.

Labs Editor David Lin
Contributors Tim Dean, Mat Toor, Howard Oakley
This article appeared in the August, 2000 issue of PC Authority.


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