Nilesh.org Notes on technology and everything else

One of the great desires of a music buff who is also a technogeek is to own
an mp3 player which can store his whole music collection in a single place.
Well,
I have
realised it sooner than I expected it to happen. The Creative
Nomad Jukebox Zen 20GB is a perfect balance between affordability, quality,
storage and features when it comes to handling MP3s. If you wish
to put yourself in
misery for not owning one, here’s my biased review of this techno toy.
My decision to buy this toy was based purely on online reviews and user
feedbacks on various sites, the decisive one among Nomad user
sites being Nomadness.net.

Looks: The minimalist design of the Zen is what attracts
most. With an anodised aluminium casing and built-in Lithium Ion battery, the
Zen is compact at 7.6 × 11.3 × 2.5 cm. It weighs about 260 grams and looks
like a futuristic walkman. They are good enough to bundle a leather cover,
very useful in India to keep the player safe from prying eyes. :-) Heck, its
too irresistible. The LCD display is 132 × 64 pixels with a pleasant
ocean blue backlit colour. The chrome buttons on the
Zen are lesser in number than the Jukebox3. But they
are sturdy and less susceptible to spurious clicks.

Storage: The
Zen supports MP3/WMA/WAV files for playback. 20
GB of storage space means about 4000 MP3s encoded at 160kbps. I don’t consider
WMA to be in the forefront of quality audio, although the
Creative
Jukeboxes
support WMA. This much space should be enough for any serious music buff to
store his most important compilations.

But its another feature provided by
Creative that makes the 20GB capacity insufficient – the ability
to store data files. Wah! The Zen allows storing of normal data
files in addition to audio files for transfer between two computers. It is
this
attribute that made
me go away from other portable mp3 players. Although it does not show up
as a drive when connected to the PC, a small utility called Creative File
Manager is needed to copy data files to the Zen. This program is small enough
to fit on a floppy. Well, I have put it in a V-Card CD and placed the
CD in the leather case itself – quite handy.

Another feature that Creative has put in the Zen knowingly or unknowingly
is very popular among geeks – The internal design of the Zen is so simple
that one can easily upgrade the hard drive that come with
the Zen. It is a Fujitsu MHR2020AT 2.5" HDD. It can be easily replaced
by a 40GB model from the same company or that of Toshiba. Nowhere else
can I
find such configurability. Although this is not endorsed by Creative, such
an upgrade is known to have almost no problems. This is another reason
why I like this puppy very much. I am bound to finish up the existing space
in
near future and some day or the other I can try out this thing.

Sound Quality: This is so important that given all other
features of the Zen, I would have opted for the iPod if not for the excellent
audio quality of the Zen. With 98dB SNR,
75dB channel seperation and 0.1% THD,
it surpasses the iPod by miles in terms of audio quality.

Although the Zen
has in-built support for EAX effects,
an audiophile wouldn’t use them for anything more than say an auditorium
speech. More useful is the audio normalisation or what Creative calls it
– Smart
Volume Management. Basically, this is used say at night, when
in a classical rendition,
the
volume suddenly increases and you do not want to disturb the person
near you. Even in a train, when the music gets softer, the volume is
pumped up so as to enable you to hear above the train noise.

Also useful is the Playback speed control. When you are listening to a speech
and want to take down notes, you can slow down the speed without reducing
the voice pitch. Same is the case with music if you are trying to identify
the notes of a particular instrument. It can be varied from 0.5 to 1.5 times
the normal speed.

Give me anything but the headphones supplied with the Zen. These big `neck
phones’ have a bad frequency response of 40-20,000Hz.
Instead, I bought the popular ear-bud style Sony MDR E819V phones with a
wide response of 12-22,000 Hz. These are small and have good quality bass
output.

Data Transfer: The model I have is USB2 capable. It turned
out to be a better and cheaper deal than the Firewire/USB1.1 version. USB2
gives about 40-45Mbps transfer rates while copying files to the device. Compare
this with the approx. 6Mbps that USB1.1 gives and the 55Mbps of Firewire.

Misc Features: While many reviews complain about the lack
of an intuitive UI for the Zen, i am pretty satisfied with the tree-like
menu. The screen fonts are good and are available in large/small sizes with
distinct icons
for various operations. The scroll wheel is good enough for
browsing through the audio tracks. Searching by
album, artist, playlist, track, genre is possible. On-the-fly playlist generation
is possible. This is one killer feature. Few mp3 players have this capability,
although it seems trivial to implement
on a hardware player. Also tracks can be deleted from the interface.

I can play the Zen 14 hours non-stop at normal volume levels, 3 hours more
than the iPod’s. A full recharge takes about 3 hours according to my calculations.
That’s very good.

There is provision for an FM wired remote. This allows for an FM tuner,
a mic for voice recording and remote controlled operations. The FM remote
though available from Creative is a bit rare and in hot demand.

The firmware or BIOS is upgradable and hence future support for newer audio
formats should be possible. If in case there is file corruption
on the disk, a Rescue menu is available to do system tasks such as
disk scanning, formatting and OS reloading.

While the Jukebox3 has more features like
Optical line-in & line-out jacks for high quality recording, they
are almost never used unless you are at home. And if
you are at home,
why do you need a portable player? That beats me. The Zen fan doesn’t
need those extra frills.

Cons: Yes, I did find some space for these in my overtly
biased review – The Zen did hang up once. A tiny reset button did the trick
to restore to normalcy. Long file transfer operations drop in speed suddenly
sometimes.
I cannot locate the cause for that. I think the player must be pausing
for breath :-) There is no STOP button! You have to make do with a combination
of Pause+Skip buttons.

The cache on Zen is 16MB compared to the 32MB on NJB3 and iPod. This is
about 10 minutes of buffer before the music starts skipping. Isn’t that enough?
Maybe the small buffer is responsible for the bit slow scroll response of
the menu.

Software is needed to transfer files to the Zen, unlike the iPod which shows
up as a drive on the computer. That is trivial considering the file
manager program fits on a floppy.

It is 70 grams heavier than the white iPod and larger in size. The iPod
menu is more intuitive, more sensitive and lesser buttons to operate with.
But
then,
that doesn’t justify the $200 difference in cost, does it?

Ciao!