MP3 Player Best Buys

Best Buy Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB MP3 Player - Black

 


The new Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB MP3 Player - Black is our Best Buy MP3 Player because it has the richest set of features at a competitive price, with excellent Amazon customer reviews. This is one of the few MP3 Players which is far better than the equivalent iPod (the iPod Shuffle), rather than just being cheaper. If you want a colour other than black, look at the 'Also Considered' section below.

Here are some snippets from Amazon reviews:

'Creative have trumped the shuffle with the stone, and triple trumped them with the Stone Plus.'
'It's easy to use and looks nice'
'The sound quality and build quality way exceed my expectations'
'The general interface is so easy to use and display is clear and precise and transferring tracks and set up is a doddle.'
'The big deal about this player though is the sound, it's so good no muffling or background noise'


Shortlist

There are so many MP3 Players out there (well over 150 on Amazon alone) yet amazingly, few of them are good enough to be recommended. It was quite a struggle to come up with a shortlist. To get into our shortlist, an MP3 Player has to give you at least one advantage over its equivalent iPod - otherwise, why not just buy the market leader? To cut down the noise we've excluded MP3 Players with only 1Gb, except for the New Creative Zen Stone 1gb MP3 Player - Black, which competes with the iPod Shuffle. We've also excluded the many different colour versions.

Press to go to the product page on Amazon.co.uk.

 GbSales RankReviewsPrice(£) 
2
157
24.50
1
176
12.99
4
273
49.97
8
2545
99.55
2
3722
54.78
4
22700
89.95

We update these details from Amazon.co.uk every hour.

The New Creative Zen Stone 1gb MP3 Player - Black is an iPod Shuffle-killer. It's available for less than half the price of the iPod Shuffle, stores the same number of songs, and is much easier to use. There's no need to get the device to play your music at random, as it has a feature where you can easily get it to switch between albums. It gets rave reviews on Amazon - here are some snippets: 'It's got all the intuition of the Shuffle, all the space and all the style, and it's cheaper, with better quality sound.', 'Plenty of bass without being to heavy and still retains clarity on the vocals. The volume can go very loud which is good. Also you can just drag and drop folders/mp3 straight to the Zen without any software.' It was difficult deciding between the New Creative Zen Stone 1gb MP3 Player - Black and the Creative Zen Stone Plus 2GB MP3 Player - Black as our Best Buy. We decided on the Stone Plus because it has all the benefits of the Stone, yet has twice the memory, is even easier to use, and has FM radio too. We haven't cluttered up our shortlist by including the many different colour versions, so please look at the 'Also Considered' section below to get links for them.

Creative Zen also do MP3 Players which compete with the iPod Nano: the Creative Zen V+ 8GB Video Playback, FM Radio, Creative Zen V+ 4GB Video Playback, FM Radio, and Creative Zen V+ 2GB Video Playback, FM Radio. These have similar, or cheaper prices than the iPod Nano, but have more features. They are easier to use, as you just have to drag and drop MP3 files onto the device. They come with an FM radio, with 32 presets. Snippets from Amazon reviewers: 'Sound reproduction is excellent and its really easy to use. I have put the equivalent of 20 albums on it and its used less than 1G of memory', 'I can honestly say I think its fantastic; extremely easy to use, the software was a piece of cake and the radio is a fabulous bonus'. If you want an MP3 Player which competes with the iPod Video, take a look at the Creative Zen Vision: M - 60gb Multimedia Player.

We've included a range of Sony Walkmans because of Sony's outstanding technology. Don't forget that they invented the personal stereo, and have been in this business the longest. Apple sell more MP3 Players than Sony, but you could argue that that was all about fashion and marketing. If you want the best technology, then go for one of the Sony MP3 Players. The Sony proprietary ATRAC audio file compression algorithm is probably the best on the planet, especially the latest version, ATRAC Advanced Lossless. All of our shortlisted models support ATRAC Advanced Lossless, so will give you the best sound quality available from an MP3 Player. Another plus is that ATRAC compresses better than MP3, so your Sony MP3 Player typically stores twice as much music than the average MP3 Player (ATRAC3 Plus at 64 kbps sampling rate sounds the same as a 128 kbps MP3 file).

The downside to Sony MP3 Players using ATRAC is that you need to use Sony proprietary software to do the compression. SonicStage is the program you need, and this comes with the MP3 Player. Early versions of this are buggy, so it is essential that the first thing you do is to download SonicStage 4.3 from the Sony website - don't use any earlier version. You need a Windows PC for SonicStage, so if you're an Apple Mac fan, stick with an Apple iPod. Note that several Amazon reviewers of Sony MP3 Players don't understand that ATRAC is the point of getting a Sony MP3 Player - so there's no point about whinging about no Mac support, or having to use SonicStage. So the Amazon review ratings are typically worse than they should be, skewed by poor ratings by these people. If this paragraph is worrying you, then go for an Apple iPod, or a Creative Zen MP3 Player.

Battery life is the other outstanding quality of Sony MP3 Players. The Sony NWE015BC 2GB Walkman is the cheapest of our shortlisted Sony MP3 Players, and gives you 30 hours battery life after charging for only 2 hours. Best of all, if the battery is flat, if you charge it for just 3 minutes you'll then get 3 hours playing time. If you're considering buying an iPod Shuffle, then do take a look at the Sony NWE015BC 2GB Walkman first. If you want an FM radio too, go for the Sony NWE015FBC 2GB Walkman, FM Radio.

For excellent sound quality, 50 hours battery life (yes, 50!), FM radio, and noise reduction headphones - go for the Sony NWS706 4GB MP3 Player, Noise Cancelling or Sony NWS705 2GB MP3 Player, Noise Cancelling. Snippet from an Amazon reviewer: 'I don't know how anyone can struggle with this unit unless they are completely inept with technology. The software installed and ran fine ripping my moderately sized library to it in less than 25 minutes. The sound quality is awesome'. The Sony NWA808FB 8GB Video Walkman - black, Sony NWA806FB 4GB Video Walkman black and Sony NWA805B 2GB Video Walkman - black are the top of the range Sony Video MP3 Players.


Also considered

Press to go to the product page on Amazon.co.uk.

 GbSales RankReviewsPrice(£) 
4
789
46.99
1
1194
12.99
2
1391
35.33
1
1565
25.73
4
1750
49.89
2
2065
25.99
1
2530
17.99
1
3415
21.58
30
5863
189.99
2
6082
34.20
2
9429
49.23
2
9687
44.89
2
9899
27.99
2
21611
35.45
4
26423
54.49
2
33638
73.99

We update these details from Amazon.co.uk every hour.

If you're not sure what kind of MP3 Player to buy, our MP3 Player Catalogue page lists around 100 MP3 Players in a table which you can sort by product feature.

©2007 SiftAndSort.co.uk