Sansa Mp3 Players Suck.

Hey everybody, welcome to our regular consumer guide slot, and…. well, yeah, but loathe as I am to interrupt this blog’s valuable contribution to global discourse on contemporary musical cultures, can’t let this one go by without a quick warning – after all, I owe it to my loyal readers to help them avoid potential hazards and stay happy and safe and slowly going deaf however I can.

So my beloved old Rio mp3 player packed in last week – can’t complain I suppose, it’s done pretty damn well in this age of inbuilt obsolescence, serving faithfully for over five years in the face of innumerable pavement droppages, rainstorms, battery fuck-ups etc. It was a good little blighter.

So naturally I thought I’d pick up another one to replace it, until a brief web search revealed that Rio actually went bankrupt back in 2005, meaning I must have bought one of the last batch of their machines to actually hit the shelves. Oh well. Let’s see what else is out there.

In short, I went for a Sansa; looked cheap and practical and reliable and works drag-and-drop style with both OS.X and Windows, gets a near-universal thumbs up from online reviewers – suits me. When it arrives it’s nicely designed and reassuringly weighty for its size and works straight away and has an interface so instinctive a gorilla could probably use it, and gains extra points by vestige of the fact that the whole spin-wheel thing has been ripped off wholesale from the iPod with an applaudable sense of “fuck you, whatcha gonna to about it” gall. What could possibly go wrong, right?

Spent yesterday loading it up with music, and took it out for it’s first test run on the way to work this morning.

Oh, fuck me. This thing is quiet.

Ok, don’t panic, maybe it’s just this one mp3 being funny or something.

So I put on the MC5, and turn the volume up to max, and slide all the digital EQ sliders up to maximum (and I’m listening via Sennheiser high output in-ear ‘phones, I should clarify).

Still quiet.

Quiet like the free gift CD walkman that I used to wander around town wrestling with back when I was on the dole. Quiet like, I can hear traffic from the road clearly. Quiet like, forget any thoughts you might have of ever listening to anything other than ultra-compressed, distorted rock music on this thing, even indoors. Quiet like, FUCK YOU SANSA, I actually can’t BELIEVE you’re pulling this shit on people in 2010, take your mp3 player and stick it.

And not just quiet – I mean, I’m hopefully not some kind of morbid volume fiend or anything – but this just sounds crap - muffled, flat – kinda like the tape player on some old kitchen mini-hifi thing with all the EQ pushed down to minus whatever. Did Steve Jobs get his revenge for the spin-wheel thing by sneaking in at night and fucking up their preamps, or whatever the digital equivalent of a preamp is..?

Did all the people who gave this thing positive reviews just not like music much, or have I got a dud or something? Or is my hearing even worse than I thought?

Whatever the case, time to start to unpleasant process of hassling someone for a refund. I get the feeling that “yeah, it works, it’s just shit, sorry” isn’t going to go down well.

I guess I’ll get another Sony one instead – they’re tacky pieces of crap made by a company I actively dislike and I find the output a bit thin and trebley, but at least I can hear it.

Hey, remember when we all thought it was a flat-out miracle that you could carry a hundred and something albums around in yr pocket? What a life-changer, what a beautiful, extraordinary piece of technology.

The gag is, my Rio one has now come back to life and is working perfectly, so I can deafen myself further with Sex Vid and Overnight Lows on the way home. Viva 2005! They really made things to last back in them days.

Labels: impotent rage, rambling, technology