Help w/ I-Pod

[Slosh]

I'm liking what I'm seeing as far as flash memory goes, that is, its coming down in price. I wonder if they are all scarificing soemthing for all that extra storage space. Sandisk Sansa has a new one that came out that supposedly has better playback quality, 8 gig memory, with video capability and an expandible memory slot - it was on sale for $169.00 a few weeks ago.

I got that one for my mother for her b-day and quite frankly it sounds awful, but she says it's fine. She pretty much only uses it at the gym so she's not focusing on the music, obviously. Also its interface is really slow.

My iPod (30GB 5th generation) was actually my daughter's. She somehow managed to break the HDD and Apple wanted $286 + $30ish to ship there and back. Yeah right. I got her a new one, only this time with a good protective skin. So the broken iPod sat in a drawer for about six months. I figured I'd use it for parts one day if necessary. I already had a Toshiba Gigabeat S30 for myself and it definitely sounds better than the iPod. Even mp3 on the Toshiba sounds better than lossless on the iPod. Of course lossless on the Toshiba sounds better still and unlike the iPod you can hear the difference. Also its interface is much quicker than the iPod. But . . . since I've pretty much only been putting lossless files on it I got to the point where I was running out of room and there's not much on there I want to delete off so I googled replacement iPod HDDs and came across www.ifixipodsfast.com and got a new one for $100 and installed it myself (very easy, BTW).

So since the iPod can't match the sonics of the Toshiba (still not too bad, though) I only put mp3s on and use it when quantity is more important than quality. Actually I find myself using the iPod more often thanks to its gapless playback and smart playlists.

[3-LockBox]

I got that one for my mother for her b-day and quite frankly it sounds awful, but she says it's fine. She pretty much only uses it at the gym so she's not focusing on the music, obviously. Also it's interface is really slow.

That sounds about right. I have a Sansa E140, w/ expandible memory and it has SRS WOW (just like Windows Media Player) and EQ. The ones that replaced it, the 230 and 240, do not have expandible memory and do not have the SRS WOW, and they sound like sh!t. Looks like I'll be hanging on to my E140.

Another thing that bugs me about the Sansa line (all of them, is that their random play feature is only semi random, I get repeats within a couple hours when I have at least 8 hours of music on board. And every time you turn the unit off, the random cycle starts all over again.