Audio Reviews

Get immersed in superb acoustic performance with the Creative Inspire™ T2900 2.1 speaker system. With 60 Watts of System Power, two-way speaker design, the unique Audio Control Pod, and additional features like removable stands to enable wall mounting, the Creative Inspire T2900 is our complete music playback solution.

2-Way Satellite Speaker Design
The satellite speakers each feature a tweeter and a midrange driver for smooth and accurate high frequency response and clear, balanced music playback.

Audio Control Pod
This versatile wired remote includes the patent-pending M-PORT™ connector for directly streaming music from compatible Creative audio players*-- no messy cables required. It also features stereo line-in, a headphone jack, power on/off and volume/bass controls.
Reinforced Wooden Subwoofer for Powerful and Clean Bass
The Inspire T2900 features a powerful wooden subwoofer, with a 5.25" long-throw driver and a dual flared port tube, for powerful and rock solid bass.

Let's look at the key competition: The Logitech X-220 has just a 2" driver in each satellite, while the T2900 has a 2.5" midrange driver and a tweeter. (Not to mention the fact that the X-220's satellites look like little plastic mushrooms).

The Altec 221 has just a 4" woofer (while the T2900 has a 5.25" woofer), and much lower power.

The T2900 also has a cool wired controller, with power/volume, bass level, a headphone jack, a line-in, and Creative's special port for connecting a MuVu NX MP3 player.

Plus, with the metal stands, they look really good (especially with the grills off).

[...- I talked to Creative's customer support people, and they say that out of the many thousands of these systems that have been sold, they've had a grand total of four defective units returned. Hardly a "plethora" ...]

The satellites themselves are nice and clear. I keep the bass volume level at about 20 percent and the speaker volume at about 30 percent. The volume control is pretty sensitive which shows exactly how how much power is being pumped out by this system. I recommend these.. and for this price, this is a great buy.

Only a couple complaints:

1. Thus far, I have not found a way to rip CD's directly to the iPod. You must first save them to iTunes, build a playlist, and then place it on the iPod. This is simple, but creates files on your computer that you must delete if you don't want to take up hard drive space.

2. Included earbuds sound pretty good, but are somewhat uncomfortable.

3. The shiny case picks up fingerprints easily. These clean off very easily, but it somewhat mars the appearance of this beautiful little device.

4. You can't play songs through the iPod itself while it's plugged in to the computer (in fact, you can't use any of the iPod's buttons). You can, however, play the songs on the iPod through iTunes.

Other than these minor things, the iPod is 100% fantastic. It is far superior to other jukeboxes I have seen. While pricey, it is worth the cost.

I have had the ipod for eight months now, and it is still working perfectly well, showning just how durable it is (i have put it through quite a bit). Also, the controls are incredibly easy to learn and understand, even for the technically inept. another thing that I really like about the ipod, other than the sheer quantity of music that it holds, is the size of the screen, as well as the backlight, which is very bright. The large screen makes it wonderfully easy to see all of the information about the song. The final thing that I really love about the ipod is the fact that you canupgrade the software that it uses whenever apple comes out with a new version of the software.

The picture is stunning, sharp with accurate color, the sound is quite good (I always use the stereo for movies), and as I said, the quality is top notch. My degree is video production and I'm very picky about picture quality. I've never been disappointed.

It is a big beast, but on an entertainment center with wheels its not a problem for us (except when we moved.) The Amazon red carpet service delivery was absolutely worth it.

I can only say that I have been extremely happy with my purchase. One of the first events I captured was my girlfriends little sisters HS graduation. The picture quality and sound play back especially during music performances was great.

We did but a 8 hour battery which added a little weight but runs for seems like forever. We also bought the telephoto lens for those really far away shots.

I normally turn off the digital zoom unless I have an extremely steady hand or have it on a tripod. As you get into the higher zooms if the camera is shaking the pictures gets unusable. Put it on a tripod and at full digital zoom it almost looks as good as optical zoom.

I've used it to capture pictures and then pass this to my computer and have been very happy with the special effects as well.

Robert

Setup of the unit is a breeze (you'll barely need the included manual) and synchronizing the unit with a PC is fast and effortless. Everything you need to get up and running is included in the box (USB adapter cable, power cable, companion CD with MS ActiveSync and MS Outlook 2002, and a carry case). I highly recommend the Viewsonic V36 PDA.

Tangent to the 128MB Olympus Smart Media Card is their Card Reader. I opted out of that option, because the only benefit of it seemed to be the convenience of not having to plug your camera into a USB port. This in my mind is off-set by the inconvenience and exposure to damage of removing the card itself to put it into the reader, sounds like an excuse to sell "every available gadget" to me. So why not download directly from the camera? The only other argument in favor of the card reader is that it saves camera batteries, and although I'm getting slightly off subject here, it goes almost without saying that if you are using NiMH 1700 - 2000 mAh rechargeable batteries, which I think you will find is the best bet in the long run, leaving your camera on a few more seconds is immaterial.

One draw back I've found are that you can't upload mp3's to another computer. It gives you an error saying that uploading mp3's is illegal and I won't even go into why that is messedup. It claims to be that smallest player out there but from what I've seen it's about as big a the Rio boxes. It's about the size of pack of cards. The realjukebox software it comes with won't record from my CDROM drive at all. I had to go and get a free ripper and encoder. USB would be nice but Parrallel works just fine...

I just got the Samsung Yepp and I think it's a great player. From the moment you open the box it definitely has that "touch me, feel me" look to it. This thing is very very small (smaller than I expected from pictures on the web), I'd say about the size of a deck of cards. You can easily "palm" it in your hand, and it weighs almost NOTHING (I hardly notice it when it's in my pocket, I think it's lighter than my wallet). This certainly beats carrying around a discman and a caselogic.

The sound quality is excellent (The earbuds that come with it are okay, but I prefer my Sony Fontopias). The controls are intuitive, and the PC interface software is easy to use (Make sure to get the newest version from the samsung website). The voice recorder is definitely a nice bonus; it's great for recording lectures in class. I don't use the phonebook feature b/c I have a Palm Pilot, but that's also a nice feature.

My only reservations are that:

It only plays MP3 format, unlike other players which also support RMA, WMA, etc.
There's no backlighting for the LCD.
No USB yet (but due out soon).

If you can deal without these extras for now, this player is for you. If you shop around, you can find this player a lot cheaper than any other player out there.

NOte: I do not know if this will work for all cd players

As most previous reviewers noted, the Hold/Resume button doesn't allow you to do both at once and furthermore the Resume option doesn't actually work. I find that with a little file/folder organization, it's easy to find the song I left off at without needing the Resume button, and as for the options being mutually exclusive, if I want to use the Hold option, it's usually because I'm going to be travelling for a long enough time that resuming exactly where I left off is not vastly important. But that's just my take.

If you're considering a flash or hard drive MP3 player, get an MP3/CD player instead. High capacity flash players are expensive whereas CD-Rs easily carry 700MB, and an erasable CD-RW acts pretty much like a mini hard drive. I have little faith in hard drives, as the one in my laptop failed after a year. But what REALLY did it for me is that you can't play a conventional CD on a flash or hard drive MP3 player. What if you're on a short trip and buy a CD? In order to listen you'd either have to a laptop or a CD player in addition to the MP3 player. With an MP3/CD player, this isn't an issue -- it's so convenient it's beautiful.

So save yourself the trouble and get an MP3/CD player! It's convenient and this one is particularly good!

This player does not skip.. with the skip protection off it barly skips when i take a miss step. takes alot of motion to get to skip. if only awia had put the same cd drive in their mp3 car player.. that thing skips!! and thats very anoying when i am driving..

This player can hold what over a hundred songs. More if you encode at a lower bit rate then the 220kbps average i get from the HQ VBR encoding method. I have 104 songs on the (iso9660+joliet multi session disc) cd-rw i have in my exp301 right now. the songs are grouped into directorys named in the following format 'artist - album'. I have never had a desire to read id3 tags on the player. I know every song on the disc already, adn can tell instantly what i am listening to since i have only ripped the HITS.

I am ripping my mp3's in VBR format at a quality of 100% using the great software that come with my sounblaster live card.. something called creative playcenter 2. if you have an old verson go and get an update from their website. They make it so easy to rip and encode using the best encoder known to mankind franhoufer!

If your going to rip your cd collection i suggest using a cd rewriter drive to do the ripping. you will have many more glich free mp3's this way.. it has to do with the quality of the head tracking and positioning.. read only cdrom drives are made much cheaper by skimping on the head positioning hardware

I would also suggest ezcd creator for multisesson, or direct cd for udf (DRAG AND DROP like a big floppy disk) formated CD's. You will most probley get a basic edition of this great product with what ever cd burner you have, or will buy. If not then go and buy version 5.0 on here.