MP3 players -- geek wisdom sought

[undyingking]

I'm thinking about getting an MP3 player, but rather than go into the tiresome business of researching the market myself, I thought I'd see if any of you guys are reasonably up to speed and could make recommendations!

Required features:

• lots of storage (10s of GB);
• decent sound quality;
• easy to hook up to PC;
• most important, easy to hook up to hifi aux in, ie. to act as a de facto hifi component;
• can run off mains;
• decent battery etc performance
• decent headphones (or, ability to replace headphones with decent ones).

Not-required features:

• considerations of portability / durability etc (unlikely to take it anywhere more exotic than the garden);
• support for dozens of obscure / proprietary file formats;
• wonderfully intuitive / one-button interface (it's likely to live on shuffle);
• coolour screen etc;
• stunning looks.

And a price of somewhere around the £150-200 mark I guess. Any thoughts?

(Do these things come with digital radios at all these days? That would be cool.)

Comments

[wimble.livejournal.com]

You say "decent battery performance". Is that a requirement?

There's a Dension on ebay for 80 quid.

It has no batteries. But it's got more hard disk storage than anything on the market. Not least, because you can just take out the drive, and swap in another: mine's on 160 Gig.

It's designed for in-car use, and comes a bay for such purposes (so it runs directly of the cars wiring, with no need to plug into the lighter socket, or so forth).

It might fail on the "easy to hook up to PC" issue: it comes as a removable hard-drive, which means installing a caddy in the PC, and rebooting whenever you want to insert or remove it. The USB adaptor for mine was another 50 quid.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

I think it might fail on the 'easy to hook up to hifi' issue as well, unless I start parking the car in my office. But sounds interesting, good to know that such things exist!

[wimble.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's easy to hook up the the hifi: there's a headphone socket, and a transformer, so you run a 3.5mm stereo jack from the hifi, plug it into the socket, plug the dension into the mains, and away you go.

It's even got separate memories for running from the mains, and running from your car battery, so tweaking the setup for one doesn't affect the other.