creative zen touch mp3 are great. Never had any trouble with my 40Gig. Better than the apple stuff..

correct, much better than apples crap i(mage)-pod, but the customer service is crap, when i tried to make a playlist and export it, my player disconnected and froze...everytime. and now this fiasco(see the CRC site if you want more info) with it uninstalling the firmware and now uploading new firmware, turining it into a 200 quid paperweight....pisses me off.
i think ill get a sony one...my brothers mate ahs a very good one, and actually comes WITH decent headphones.

my Zen Touch works well, albeit every now and again!

iRiver is still the way to go if you want really good audio quality...

Surely good audio quality mp3 player is a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as a high quality mp3 file is there?

I can make one

Mp3 files use 'loss compression' though. For that reason they will always be inferior to CD and vinyl.

LOL go learn your MPx's!

MP7 is the future

Quote from Gentlefoot :

Surely good audio quality mp3 player is a contradiction in terms. There's no such thing as a high quality mp3 file is there?

Nope, good quality is something even .mp3s can have... But it needs to be AT LEAST 192 kb/s... Anything under this level just sounds awful, 365 (or was it 360?) kb/s are pretty good, there isn't really much lost... If you can hear a difference at this level, hats off to you...

I prefer .ogg anyway, which is a codec the iRivers can play, and it's way ahead of .mp3s... And for all those who want lossless codec only, the H120 can handle .asf too...

What makes the iRivers so good is the signal output level, which is way better than those iPods and others...

We are a little bit far OT, aren't we?

Quote from bbman :

Nope, good quality is something even .mp3s can have... But it needs to be AT LEAST 192 kb/s... Anything under this level just sounds awful, 365 (or was it 360?) kb/s are pretty good, there isn't really much lost... If you can hear a difference at this level, hats off to you...

It doesn't matter which bitrate you encode an mp3 to, it's a lossy format that gets rid of audio data to save space. If you can hear it or not isn't the question.
Highest quality mp3 is still only at about ~23% of original bandwidth, needless to say some bits have gone missing.
Mp3 or one of it's lossy alternatives is basically the final resting ground for any produced audio, the lowest form of existance. Doesn't mean it can't sound great tho

For the record, I had a few great races on CRC Demo (admin'd) this arvo.
Kudos to you blokes for running a demo server that has good admins there most of the time .

Hey all, just a quick note on the Fusion server...

The server is now private and only 1.32.99 or better (some exceptions of course) racers can get the pass, we had no choice but to do this after a few morons thought it would be fun to start using our nick's and crashing on our and other servers.

If you don't already have the pass then drop us a line at our forums www.fusionracing.tk and give your lfsworld.net nick to us and we'll send you the pass through lfsworld.net.

We're sorry about the inconvenience but we don't have a choice at the moment until the server follows the team to s2 in the next couple of months.