SanDisk Digital Audio Player

Submitted by pcsnpixels on December 31, 2005 - 12:43pm.

Hardware

SanDisk Digital Audio Player
256MB
by Adam Cochran
June 2005

I love portable audio. Through the years I have carried portable radios, cassette players, and CD players.

MP3 players are one of my favorite technologies, they take away all of the disadvantages of previous forms of portable audio and increase the advantages.

For example, most MP3 players are flashed based (no moving parts). This means that you can jog, walk or hula-hoop and the device won't skip. MP3 players are also small, most being somewhere between the size of a box of matches and a pack of cigarettes (I don't smoke, I'm just making comparisons).

Perhaps the greatest advantage to MP3 players is that they hold vast amounts of audio.

SanDisks 256MB Digital Audio Player excels in everything a good MP3 player should.

The device is the size of a cigarette lighter (just to keep the standard going), it holds at lest 5 CDs worth of music, it operates on a single AAA battery, and it comes with an arm strap so you can wear it while hula-hooping.

Great features don't end there. Sandisk has gone beyond the ability to play ripped tunes. An FM tuner and a voice recorder have also been added to this tiny device.

For those who don't have an aptitude for learning how to manipulate the features of new gadgets, fear not. The instructions for this audio player are a single page and there are only five buttons on the whole device. A monochrome, backlit LCD screen displays information such as Album title, song title, selected radio station or other current settings.

As for sound quality, the audio is crystal clear, provided the original recording was crystal clear. The bass was limited, but this is more due to the headphones it comes with. I tried a set of my own headphones and the bass was increased and I was very pleased with the overall sound quality.

While SanDisk now has a full line of digital audio players, this particular model comes in three memory sizes, 256, 512MB and 1 gigabyte. The 256MB model is the one I reviewed and I think it is perfect for those who enjoy audio books or want to hear the tunes of a specific artist, but for long road trips and ripping larger collections of music, the larger storage capacity models are probably worth the extra money.