I just returned my Jukebox today to Best Buy.

There is a lot to like about it and I think it will get better with firmware upgrades. The Creative rep on the Nomad newsgroup (only at news.creative.com) is very responsive and actively solicits suggestions. I found the interface on the unit to be non-intuitive but once I groked it, it was functional. It does a nice job of providing some default organization based on ID3 tags without having to create playlists. The USB transfer was reasonable though not great at 2-3 Mbps.

I agree that the PC software is awful. It's another non-standard, polished chrome UI that doesn't follow conventional UI rules and can't be maximized. I didn't buy a 21" monitor so that I could suffer with tiny little list boxes crammed in 800x600 windows! I also crashed my Win2k box badly multiple times. And I agree that it's inexcusable that it doesn't automatically traverse deep directory structures.

Despite the flaws of the PC software, the unit itself is nice and I might have kept it.... except for it's fatal flaw: it sounds like crap!. I'll tell you my dirty little secret - I bought the Jukebox in the hopes that it would prove to be an adequate MP3 player for my car and I wouldn't have to shell out the big bucks for the Empeg. Obviously, it's far less capable than the Empeg in many ways but I was hoping that for $800 less I could live with it. As soon as I actually hooked it up to my car stereo the answer was obviously no. The little amp that drives it's outputs is just too weak. Maybe it's OK for the junk headphones they include but it sounded horrible in my car. I have a very modest system in my car but it was more than enough to highlight the weakness of the Jukebox's output. The volume was dramatically lower when feeding the Jukebox into the aux input of my head unit vs. the internal CD player. And once I boosted the volume to compensate the weaknesses of it's pitiful little amp were loud and clear. Bass was weak, highs were shrill and the dynamics were lost. It sounded like I was running it through a compressor or listening on a bad FM station. I know that the MP3 I was playing is fine. I encoded it using LAME at a fairly high VBR and I've listened to it on my computer.

This is the first time I'd used the aux input of my head unit so I brought out my portable CD player to compare. I have a Panasonic player that I know has a decent headphone output. It's the only portable player that I've found that can power my good Sennheiser headphones. Anyway, the Panasonic sounded fine when I ran it through my head unit.

It's unfortunate that Creative decided to skimp in this area. I'm guessing one or both of these conditions led to them using such a poor amp.

1. They were struggling to make the magic $499 price point and had to cut corners.
2. They knew that battery life was going to be a big complaint so they tried to minimize power consumption.

Their newsgroup is already full of requests for them to increase the volume level. People seem to be under the illusion that it can be fixed with firmware. (Like they'll just turn the knob to 11.) So far the complaints just seem to be related to headphone volume. I haven't yet read of too many people hooking this thing up to home and car audio systems. I think they are going to be very disappointed when they do so.

It's a nice unit for portability if used with undemanding headphones.

-Dylan


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