-
Hey, guest user. Hope you're enjoying NeoGAF! Have you considered registering for an account? Come join us and add your take to the daily discourse.
Creative Nomad Zen Xtra 40 GB Digital Audio Player
- Thread starter Beezy
- Start date
- Status
I own the 30GB version. For the price I paid, I love it. Plus Nomad's have some of the best audio quality you're going to hear out of an MP3 player. I even connect it to my car's stereo now and then - sound great and the battery life is wonderful.
metsallica
Member
It's a great player, with probably the best audio fidelity of any portable on the market. My only issue with it is the same issue I have with nearly every jukebox: ID3 tags. If they're not impeccably ordered, your music will get lost. Plain and simple. Granted, keeping tabs on your tags is much easier these days with software like iTunes, but it's a hassle for people with gargantuan music libraries. My next player will be an iRiver just so I can keep my directory structure intact and not have to worry about the little inaccuracies.
EDIT:
EDIT:
Without a doubt. As for the touch panel, it's a bit of a gimmick and doesn't work that great. Unnecessary.Beezy said:
Gah, there's so much different mp3 players. What's this iRiver you speak of?
Edit: Searched it and found the iRiver H120. To me, the black makes it look sexier than Ipod, doesn't seem like you have to worry about getting scratches with it and the battery life is longer. It's $30 more though and I'm not sure about it's size.
Edit: Searched it and found the iRiver H120. To me, the black makes it look sexier than Ipod, doesn't seem like you have to worry about getting scratches with it and the battery life is longer. It's $30 more though and I'm not sure about it's size.
Best Buy is currently selling this thing for $219 + tax, but there's a $20 mail-in rebate. And someone on Fatwallet was kind enough to post a link to this coupon for 10% off in-store purchases of certain items-like mp3 players.
Can ya dig it?
Can ya dig it?
arter_2
Member
hmm I must be in the minority I hated the zen it was a very bad made piece of machinery. It has way to much plastic the metal face plate cover comes off in your pocket and the scroll nub is a joke compared to the one on the ipod. I traded mine in after 3 days for an ipod and I haven't looked back since it did have great battery life and sound but it was just made to cheap fo me.
ArcadeStickMonk
Member
Go straight to hell. You plugged that piece of shit into my PC once for five minutes and I still can't get rid of the software remnants.dark10x said:
Sounds better than an iPod.... geez, go back to counting fog sprites in Silent Hill.
arter_2 said:
Too much plastic? The only plastic is the material on the outer perimeter of the device, and you can kind of understand having that as a buffer of protection. Both the top and bottom faces are made of metal. As for having the face come off in your pocket, I can't say I've ever had that problem - you have to push the release latch pretty hard before the faceplate comes off, and at least Creative makes it easy to replace the battery through that method. And yes, the Zen does sound better than an iPod, although the difference isn't enough to really warrant one over the other unless you're an utter audiophile. The Nomad's continue to have the lowest signal noise ratio of any players out. So far I find the device to be really well constructed, and I've owned it for almost half a year now. For size and weight, you can't beat the iPod, but the Zen is a good economical alternative.
Actually, it does. The intenal hardware produces a higher sound quality than the iPod (higher signal to noise ratio, for example) in addition to a better EQ. I could care less about size and "style", so paying over 8 times as much for an iPod wasn't going to be worth it (since I got this unit for just $50).
Creative's software is shit (which is what you are complaining about), but that doesn't mean the hardware is.
The iPod is a quality piece of hardware, no doubt, but you should not assume that the higher price == higher sound quality. If that were true, we'd all be after new Bose speakers...
dark10x said:
Yes, it is, but if you install just the Windows driver necessary it's alot more bareable. That's only like a 1.5MB install and gives you access to the device within Explorer. Really, what more do you need...
ive owned my 40gig nomad jukebox 3 for over two years now. hasn't clunked out on me yet....though it does tend to crash at start up sometimes. anyway, while the sound quality isn't bad, these dedicated mp3 payers sound nowhere near as good as what you can get from a desktop PC or even laptop via Winamp with DFX installed. it literally breathes new life into your mp3s.
dark10x said:
Yep, Creative loves the bloatware, which is a shame, since they make some great hardware. Everytime I reinstall the drivers/software for my Audigy I have to weed out all the extraneous crap they insist on installing, such as their lovely pointless startup logo that eats up about 10 seconds of my boot time. You have to edit the damn registry to get rid of it, how ridiculous is that...
The Interrobanger
Member
I just ordered a 40GB Zen Xtra today and I can't wait for it to arrive. I'm the only one in my family/group of friends that went with the Zen Xtra instead of an iPod (One of my brothers has a 40GB iPod, Dad has a 15GB, Numerous friends have 20GB ones) but after doing alot of research, I know I made the right decision. It only cost me $235 USD including shipping to Canada (compared to around $399 + shipping for an iPod) and with the how great the Canadian dollar has been doing lately, it's a steal.
Hmm, do you guys think that Red Chair's software is worth the look-see? Gear@IGN seems to like their stuff a lot.
The Interrobanger
Member
Grimlock said:
I downloaded it, but I haven't got my player yet so I haven't tested it.
From what I've seen it looks good though.
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Poll