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

Re: A sore point

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

Well, it's the masses that count, not spods discerning types ;)

Try misticriver.net, the forums have a buy/sell section and there's usually someone trading up/out from an H120 every week or so, plus Jeff does I think sell reconditioned ones from misticaudio.com (I say "I think" because I can never get the latter site to load, even though Google claims to have trawled through it this morning!).

Re: A sore point

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Bah, looking back on eBay I see I've just missed a whole bunch of H140s that went for less than 100 EUR each! -- I'll have to keep monitoring it...

Alternatively

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

If you really don't want something particularly portable, Morgan has an 80Gb freecom media player for under £190.

I am sure you are the sort of law-abiding person who would not dream of buying one of those low-power FM transmitters which effectively allow you to listen to your music in the garden with any old FM radio.