Best sounding current MP3 on the market?

[Rich'[ard]]

hey, just wondering if anyone knew which current mp3 player has the best sound quality.

i googled it up, and all that came up was reviews on very old mp3s.

i'm a Samsung fanboy (hehe) and i think all Samsung mp3s have very very good sound quality. you get a fully customisable 12 band equaliser and it actually works. the bundled headphones are actually awesome. bass and treble wise.

i have the YP-T9 btw.

i'm annoyed at how many people have iPods. they sound so bad with the stock headphones, but maybe they sound ok with some good Seinheissers or Creatives.

i guess i could ask 2 questions
which is the best sounding mp3 with its bundled headphones

and

which is the best sounding mp3 altogether (the sound engine of the mp3)?

[Mpegger]

Creatives had the edge over other portables as far as sound quality is concerned (although iRiver products did have the edge for some time with some of thier earlier offerings), but like you found, these were all comparison reviews, postings (as well as my own listening experience), from some time ago. Creative still sould have the edge though with their newer portable that includes X-Fi Crystalizer (although there are plenty of purist who prefer not using the Crystalizer), as well as a decent set of IEMs instead of the usual 99 cent ear buds.

As far as best sounding encoding, sould goto LAME with the extreme settings. Although its still lossy, the sound is practically indistinguishable from the original source, unless you have a really well trained ear and very high end equipment that is capable of the quality of playback needed to hear the differences.

Playback though I dunno. Your pretty limited to whatever codec is used for playback by the portable, but in this day and age, most codecs are very mature and its difficult to tell the difference between playback codecs as to which is better then the other.

[bz2klag]

I will second that. Creative is credited with making some of the best
sounding players.

[nightelph]

Forget not that regardless of whatever sound chip and codec used in a device, your bottleneck are your headphones... Unless your headphones are very freakin' nice. Then the bottleneck lies in the chip or the song.

[supra]

cowon is another contender to add to the list, added bonus of being able to play FLAC files for anything you happen to feel worth ripping into a lossless format

[Blazing fire]

Forget not that regardless of whatever sound chip and codec used in a device, your bottleneck are your headphones... Unless your headphones are very freakin' nice. Then the bottleneck lies in the chip or the song.

Don't forget amplifiers

[thideras]

cowon is another contender to add to the list, added bonus of being able to play FLAC files for anything you happen to feel worth ripping into a lossless formatI'd like to add that Rockbox for the iPod can do that also :santa:

[Flip-Mode]

Hope this is still relevant but the SanDisk Sansa Clip is credited with one of the best DAC's out there right now and audiophiles say its on par with the Ipod SQ.
Check out www.head-fi.com

[Mpegger]

The Ipod was never that great to begin with, and from what I have read and experienced (in the past), Apple never made any improvements to the outputs and kept the same setup from one generation to the other.

Is this better SQ only relevant to the newer gens, because I just cannot see it (hear it :p ) applying to the older models (up to the touch series as thats the only ones I have not used with a quality pair of IEMs).

[SeanBest]

I like Creative, my brother has an older one, still bomb today, my other brother has an ipod ... ehh, it's ok, my dad and I both have phillips, really like them and the noise canceling earbuds, nice and comfy...

[Dapman02]

IMO Zunes sound better than Ipod's, but that may be a little bias in there. I have heard from other souces that the Zunes are better, but I'm sure the creatives beat the zune. Zune pass FTW

[Lian Li]

Zune > *

[Spawn-Inc]

i have always liked my Creative Zen Micro, though its a bit old by todays standards. i still like creative and will recommend them.

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/9656/img1313qs0.jpg

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/2494/img0109kl4.jpg

http://img378.imageshack.us/img378/8007/img0112bn2.jpg

[Lian Li]

i have always liked my Creative Zen Micro, though its a bit old by todays standards. i still like creative and will recommend them.

http://img114.imageshack.us/img114/9656/img1313qs0.jpg

http://img410.imageshack.us/img410/2494/img0109kl4.jpg

http://img378.imageshack.us/img378/8007/img0112bn2.jpgNow that's creative

[Spawn-Inc]

then there is always mouse mods, but thats not related to this topic so i will stop :)

http://inlinethumb06.webshots.com/2949/2673316600100511463S600x600Q85.jpg

http://inlinethumb36.webshots.com/1187/2544887600100511463S600x600Q85.jpg

http://inlinethumb15.webshots.com/2126/2255918690100511463S600x600Q85.jpg

[Lian Li]

eww, should have stopped at the mp3 player

[Theocnoob]

eww, should have stopped at the mp3 player

Creative players initially sounded better than the Ipod. Currently the creative players are substantially worse than Ipod. Ipod sound quality improved noticeably however about 3/4 through the life of the product. Notably, the new touch, iphone, new classic, and new nano actually do sound substantially better than previous generations.

The problem with really any MP3 player is that they actively edit the sound to such an annoying extent that they really make it annoying to listen to them for anyone who really likes accurate sound.

The best MP3 player that was ever made was the Bang and Oelufson BEOsound. This was several hundred dollars and had no screen. I haven't seen it for several years. I've never heard anything that sounded as good.

Your best bet right now is to go for something that has a DSP you like. Forget the preamp because everything sounds like turd unless you use an actual headphone amp- especially with good earphones that require more power to drive them.

I personally find the ipod DSP extremely annoying and very innacurate. The attacks and decays it artificially forces on music in an attempt to make itself sound better are just horrible... This is especially present in the newer models however the overall higher quality of the output mitigates this.

If I could find a beosound, I would.

If not I'd buy a samsung, an ipod, a creative and a zune, $200 earphones, a $150 amp, screw around and decide which player you can live with then return the other two.

[Old Thrashbarg]

IMO Zunes sound better than Ipod's, but that may be a little bias in there.

You could plug your headphones into dog poo and it would still sound better than an iPod.

IMO Cowon has the best sounding of the reasonably priced MP3 players out there... yeah you have stuff like the Kenwood MediaKeg which might have an edge, but those things are absurdly expensive, so I wouldn't consider 'em to be a viable option for most people. I have a Cowon U5, got it for around $100 a few months ago, and I love it. I also had a D2 for awhile, it sounded equally good (though it didn't like low impedance earphones so much), only reason I got rid of it was because I couldn't bring myself to like the touchscreen. Cowons also have rather powerful amplifiers in 'em compared to most MP3 players, so they have enough juice to run fancier high-impedance headphones without trouble.

I never really liked the Creative sound... it's not necessarily bad, but they tended to be on the dark/bass-heavy side, which just isn't my thing.

And you don't need $200 earphones or any of that ridiculousness, to get good sound. There are a few options in the <$50 bracket that are just fine for most purposes... my favorites for everyday use are the Koss KSC-75 clip phones and the JVC HA-FX66 'Air Cushion' earphones.

[Wiggy Fuzz]

it's not so much that ipods sound bad, but what i do is use a line out dock and hook it up to a portable cmoy amplifier. with my *totally pwnsome* grado sr325i's i can sometimes hear my ipod struggle with a lot of music when it comes to bass and whistle at high notes, purely because the built in amp is just so small.

[Rich'[ard]]

has anyone seen the new Samsung Q1? i'm starting to like it a lot, followed by the P2. both have fairly good sound quality.
but i've read SOny mp3s have very good sound qualitiy as well.

do these big companies fair worse to the smaller sound/music electronics-only companies? because i don't think they're far off.

[Old Thrashbarg]

but what i do is use a line out dock and hook it up to a portable cmoy amplifier

Right, you can get decent sound out of 'em with a bunch of extra equipment, but then you're spending a bunch of extra money and have to carry all that crap around with you. IMO you're better off getting an MP3 player that sounds good to begin with.

Samsung Q1? The UMPC? It looks kinda cool, but I wouldn't really call it practical for most things. It's too big to use as an everyday MP3 player, not to mention it being around $1200, but it also looks a little too small and awkward to use for most things you'd need a laptop for.

The P2 is a good choice if you like touchscreens... I considered it myself when I was looking for an MP3 player, and it's a pretty nice gadget, made even better with the Korean firmware that adds some interesting extra features. (Unless those have carried over to the US firmware, it's been several months since I looked.)

As far as sound quality from big companies versus small ones, there's really no correlation. Big companies sometimes make really good players, and small companies can make really crap players.

Another one you might wanna look at is iRiver. They're a little hit-and-miss on sound quality between their models, but things like the Clix and Spinn apparently do pretty well. My dad has an Lplayer, and the sound is decent, but I love the interface.