HiFi Blog: digital audio goodness

Record store chain’s “Buy It, Burn It, Return It” policy (that’s an interesting one: at Scotti’s Record Shops in northern New Jersey, you can buy a CD, rip it/sample it/whatever and return it within 10 days to get a 70% store credit; of course, the RIAA has already knocked at their door, and our guess [...]

Deal: Olympus m:robe 100 5GB MP3 Player for $100 (costs $129.99 but there’s free shipping and a $30 mail-in rebate; HDD-based, 12-hour battery life, dock cradle for charging & transferring songs included; nothing to write home about, but, hey, it doesn’t look bad and it’s a 5GB MP3 player for a hundred bucks) [via] Why [...]

GCHA Headphone amplifier (analog—RCA—and USB inputs, a “huge power supply” to drive demanding phones, and the ‘Gain Cell’ technology that works for a pristine sound; sounds like a winner to me, and the reviews that surface are positive; starts from $995, which isn’t absurd when you consider its target market) [via] Creative Zen Sleek Photo [...]

Neuros takes open source approach to hardware and software development (there was a time when we thought Neuros was dead, but it seems they’re taking an interesting spin with regards to their 442 player, and what’s to follow after that; will their model work? striking a balance between catering to the audiophile’s needs and keeping [...]

Play it loud, and you may pay for it. A warning to all about those earbuds. Digital devices reproduce music so cleanly, listeners are less likely to turn it down (another article that urges us to lower the volume on those headphones, but this one comes with a tip, among other advice: “Sweetow, who once [...]

What the iAudio X5’s line-out bass fall-off (try saying that fast) sounds like (with sound clips; we’ve mentioned this deficiency last week) Apple Head Calls Labels ‘Greedy’ For Suggesting iTunes Price Hike (we’ve covered this before, but I’m only posting this for the following: “Speaking on condition of anonymity, one label executive said Jobs’ desire [...]

Unpeeling Apple’s Nano (your 2GB Nano costs $98.18; “Market research firm iSuppli set out to satisfy the curiosity by buying the $199 2-gigabyte version of the Nano and tearing it apart. The verdict? It costs Apple $90.18 in materials to build the unit and $8 to assemble it, leaving a profit margin before marketing and [...]

Problems surfacing with iPod Nano screen (we’ve reported on this last week; iPodNN noted that iPodResQ raised its iPod nano screen replacement by a wooping 50 bucks to $145 “due to LCD availability and overwhelming demand”; the Register thinks Apple, who has “no comment” for the time being, will improve the polycarbonate formula for the [...]

Toshiba Gigabeat X30 pics (the UI doesn’t look polished enough; more about this new model in a previous post of ours) [via] Sanyo hops aboard the portable MP3 bandwagon (the HDP-M3000 is a 6GB HDD-based MP3 player with a 12-hour battery life that measures 9×5×5cm; and the only thing going for it is the price [...]

Avid readers of the site should already know by now that iRiver’s U10 is a highly-coveted device here at HiFi Blog HQ. We were let-down a bit when we found out that it reproduces videos at a not-so-great 15FPS rate (human eyes interpret 30FPS+ sequences as a continuous, fluid movement), but when we watched that [...]