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

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

Um - one of the Rios did gapless playback. And the H1xx does with the Rockbox firmware - it even has configurable crossfade times :)

Oh how I love my H140. The principle fact I should also mention (and have not as yet) is that the H1xx series is last year's model, so you have to hunt around to find one (i.e. ebay, misticriver.net, and a few stores are still doing them end-of-line).

The other pertinent thing is that the H1xx do voice recording too, and if one were to use them as such for business purposes presumably they would be a company expense and therefore VAT-free? ;)

[t--m--i.livejournal.com]

aargh principal fact..... [sorry, long meeting, rots the brain]