Good afternoon all, and glad tidings.

I am after a new Mp3 player.

This is what I want:

No gimmicks

No frilly pictures, gadgets, flashy wirly colours

GOOD sound, I want to hear the bass, I want it to be crisp.

LOUD, to drown out the gash gym music

Small & tough.

Budget, I don

I've yet to hear an MP3 player I've been really impressed with the sound quality of...tried things like the Sansa, various iPods and the cheap unbranded stuff, and they all lack a certain presence even with good headphones.

Of those, probably the Sansa would get my money overall though...

Sony have some noise-cancelling MP3 players out, which might be better for your application - so rather than having to have it loud, it just drowns out the background noise...

Rob.

My old Rio Karma would fit the bill.

I loved that one but it just wasn't big enough; only 20GB. Bought it in preference to the iPod, same weight, longer battery life and fairly rugged.

I've never got round to selling it so, if you want, I'll do you a try before you buy

PM me if you want.

What size / storage you after ?

AS far as sound quality goes, theres not going to be much to choose from between the different models the amplifiers in these tiny devices just arent up to much, What would make more difference than the brand of mp3 player is the brand of headphones.

Nothing from Apple \ Creative \ Sony will really be any better able to produce better bass than a bog standard PDA \ cheapo MP3 Player. The shortcomings are in the small amplifiers, they can only do so much with equaliser settings if the powers not there its not there.

Even cheapo MP3 players give really good music if they are plugged into something with a decent amplifier.

You really want a headphone amplifier with some matched headphones if you want real music quality out of a prtable device, Ive been very unimpressed with standard quality from every mp3 player Ive heard.

For use in the gym a Sony would be hard to beat.

I have to say I have an old Sony 6GB player and in terms of sound quality, it leaves an ipod for dead. Once youve been in the service menu to disable the volume limits, it goes pretty loud too and gives a very good sound Of course, I have to use sonicstage though.

If you want a ultra portable light Sony player (flash based and not hard drive based), let me know, I could get you some pretty damn cheap in the next week or so

Jon, you have a Karma? Respect man. That's one proper mp3 player

There was a very interesting thread on hexus about this, James. People don't want ipods or other devices that either force you to use crippled software to transfer songs or have lots of "bloatware" inside them.

One interesting option was to flash a certain type of player with new software that gives what most people want.

Thread on hexus here. The software in question is Rockbox and appears to work on a few players.

edit: just a though: if it's for the gym, maybe the Sony stuff would be good. 50 hours audio, 50g weight :eek: and some pretty effective noise-cancelling feature built-in apparently. Found a review of one here: Zizone's NW-S706F/Black Review (edit: 2007/2/22) - ATRACLife Colloquium

Even tho i hate to hear myself say this: the latest ipods(nano) aint bad

I bought myself a 4gb nano, purely for use at the gym :rofl:

I dont care for fancy features, or the fact its a tarty ipod... its scratched to fook already.

Itunes is *bearable* because i only use it for the ipod and not every day, and have recently put a ipod adaptor in my car for my pioneer head unit so i dont need to burn new cds every time i get new music.

If your after proper no frills and dont care about choosing music.. maybe a ipod shuffle will do the job.. 55quid from the apple store.. and get yourself some Seinheiser CX300 headphones.. job done.

bit further up the scale is the nano.. louder and easier to use if your a bit more fussy about the music you want to listen to at the time..