Sounds and Soundibility
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| The PSA attached to arm Strap |
So how does this sports sculpture sound? Pretty darn good. Audio clarity and neutrality were excellent. The combination of the headphones and the player gives a pretty detailed and lively performance. I was rather impressed with how good most of my test material sounded this is easily a better sounding player than its
Rio 500 cousin, and equals the quality of the Rio 600 using stock headphones. The PSA Plays headphones are comfortable to wear, and provide a decent performance on their own. Though they gave a respectable playback, I did notice a slight dulling of the upper end frequencies, and I could tell the background wasnt as clean and open as some other headphones I tried on the Nike PSA play. There was also a slight lack of bass, which is perhaps the most common complaint for any MP3 portable stock headphones. On music with modest bass use, the earphones had a very reasonable bass response, but once I loaded up my more bassy titles, it was apparent that the headphones couldnt keep up. There was a significant amount of distortive bloat on the bassline, and the bass lacked definition and would break up if things became too intense. I switched to my regular listening phones and found immediate improvement in the overall strength and focus of bass. If youve already got a favourite pair of sports headphones, you will probably get better results using those over the stock phones.
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| The PSA's Arm Band |
The beauty of a sports portable player is that often, you are so busy with your sporty activities you dont notice the minor flaws in the sound, and when I took this cool device to the streets, that was exactly the case. I soon forgot all about sound stages, and bass representations, and accurate stereo imaging, and I became more concerned with having some music on the go, and having it in a compact and convenient to carry package. That armband became almost indispensable, though the belt clip didnt keep the player as sturdily clipped onto my pants as I would have liked (twice the player literally got jumped off and threatened to smash itself onto the pavement). You also tend to get some people asking you about the player when they see it. Theres no doubt that a silvery oval shape hugged on your arm will start getting people curious, especially once they notice the small, orange Nike swoosh.
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| MultiMedia Card & Batteries Access |
I managed to fit around 13 MP3 songs into the player. I keep most of my material in 128Kbps or 160Kbps MP3 format, but because the player supports WMA, you can easily rip all of your music in 64kbps WMA format to fit around 2 hours of music in the built-in 64MB. If you find that 64MB isnt enough, you can expand the memory up to another 96MB using MultiMedia (MMC) cards, so theres a potential for up to 3 hours of 64Kbit WMA music storage. Portable music enthusiasts will already be familiar with the amazing quality that the WMA format has even in 64Kbps, the music sounds nearly indistinguishable to 128Kbps MP3 on a portable player (the difference is much more obvious on a good pair of speakers). It just so happens that the Rio software lets you rip songs in WMA format, so the package comes with everything to live up to Nikes claim of delivering 2 hours of music. I actually fit around 15-20 songs when I used a mix of WMA and MP3 titles, and I was not surprised to have enjoyed my time through the entire playlist, not even noticing any degradation of quality when a WMA 64Kbps song started playing amongst the other 128Kbps MP3s.
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| The PSA's Remote Control |
The player is not the fastest Ive ever seen, but it does beat out the Nomad II and the Samsung Yepp in response times. Skipping from song to song was not snappy enough for me, and I get especially impatient when the adrenaline has got me going. Track seeking was as bad as the Rio 500, which makes the psa[play more akin to the
Rio 500 than the
Rio 600, the latter of which has a much snappier response time and a beautifully efficient seek capability. With the Nike PSA[play, you can forget about seeking to the middle of a track, because it literally takes 15-20 seconds to seek through a minute of the track. Ack. When skipping tracks, it also takes a half second or more before the song starts to play and the title starts to scroll across the display. Not very good for a player that caters to an active lifestyle.
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