Related Articles

Audio Quality & Final Thoughts

MP-1000 w/ stylin headphones

As far as the headphones go, they were capable and very useable. I found that they were well matched with the MPDj player, and together the pair produced airy music with just enough bass to make things exciting. The upper end was pleasant, but not overly detailed or terribly exciting. Vocals and chorus were reproduced well and without a blending that indicated poor stereo separation. I wouldn’t say that the player was superb in musical reproduction, but it certainly came reasonably close to matching the Creative Nomad II, which is the best sounding player we’ve come across so far. I think that given its above average sound, and its effective treble/bass EQ settings, the MPDj could satisify most listeners with some small tweaking of the sound. Without a doubt the player is highly suitable for portable music, since its quality surpasses my expectations for casual music “on the go”, where critical listening is always difficult and often not even an important factor in the purchase decision.

All in all, the player is easy to use, and produces nice and appealing music, but it does have a few problems that are worth pointing out. Firstly is the large jumps in The MPDj’s response to user commands is a little lagged, probably because the unit has to decode and present the information for songs.

MP-1000 w/ parallel port interface

This delay makes it difficult to quickly move through your tracks by depressing the fast forward or rewind buttons quickly because with each track change there is a slight, half-second pause… and during that pause no commands are accepted by the player. Newer generation players typically have excellent response times with very little delay when changing tracks. My biggest beef with this player is that the rewind button doesn’t function the same as the industry standard rewind function. Typically, when you press rewind on a player, it should first restart the song that you are playing, and then if you depress the button again, it should rewind to the previous track. The Audiovox MPDj suffers in that when you press rewind, it actually skips straight to the previous track. This is the very same problem that the rave mp2200 suffers from, but it is a little worse, because once you change tracks, the Audiovox has that slight half-second delay that prevents you from changing tracks again immediately. The reason why this last detail is significant is because on the rave mp2200, I could circumvent the rewind quirkiness by quickly pressing rewind and then fast forward, which effectively brought me back to the beginning of any track. It was an annoying workaround, but it worked… but on the MPDj, the delay prevents me from doing this, and trying to restart a track becomes an extreme chore.

As far as recommendations go, I have mixed feelings on the player. I was impressed with its audio quality, but the smaller memory capacity, parallel port interface, and some of its quirks became irksome to me. Certainly it represents good value for your money, if you consider that it comes full featured with backlit LCD, treble/bass settings, good overall musical reproduction, and swank earbuds that you can actually use - and I would say that it would probably be a good buy for a large majority of you, especially thanks to its memory expansion capability. I guess the last clincher in any decision making is the price, and here the Audiovox shines. Although rated at an estimated $180, the lowest prices we've seen floating around the net are closer to $135 and below - and that's not bad for a player with good quality music playback! Having seen some good things from so many companies, I am happy to say that the Audiovox holds its own against some of the better players, and while it doesn't flesh itself out as a leader in the market, it is a step in the right direction, and I can't wait to see future generation players from Audiovox.

Overall Score: 85%

send article   hardware newsletter   article comments (1)   Lowest prices check   print

Submit our article to: Digg this! del.icio.us