I received a neat gift for Christmas from my dear old dad: a 120gb Microsoft Zune. This gift was especially welcome because A) I emphatically loathe Apple, the iPod, and its associated "We've got you now, motherfucker" captive format and B) my mp3 player is an old 4gb Samsung which doesn't quite do justice to my 600gb of music. Yeah, the collection has its own hard drive.
Everything about the Zune seemed awesome. The software is amazing (especially the way it gets album info automatically and synthesizes tracks from different sources into a single album, which is really useful if most of your collection is stolen/bootlegged). The interface on the hardware is intuitive and simple to navigate. It plays almost any format. I didn't have to sign up for anything or buy my music from the hardware manufacturer in a format that would only work with its products. And its capacity is large enough to fit a lot of my favorites without having to be constantly shuffling tracks on and off the player.
After getting it set up I gave it a test run and discovered that it sounds like shit. This is unsurprising, as music played without an EQ usually sounds awful (try it on your Winamp player or car stereo if you don't understand the difference).
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I assumed that a few minutes of shuffling through the available EQ pre-sets or, failing that, fiddling with the bass/treble controls would make it sound good to my ears.
I hope you are seated. For $250, Microsoft's 120gb most-advanced-ever portable multimedia device does not have EQ pre-sets. It does not have an EQ at all. It does not even have primitive bass/treble controls like one would find on a $9.99 car stereo or a Walkman cassette tape deck from the Reagan years. It has no sound settings of any kind. It has an on/off button. Those are your options: on and off.
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Incredulous, I called Microsoft to make sure that Ed was not the problem, overlooking simple controls that are right in front of my face. Nope. There aren't any. They removed them when they discovered that most people weren't using them. Well, most people are retards and most people listen to Top 40 Country. Why take away the options for the rest of us?
The one-and-only sound from the Zune will sound awesome to you if you usually listen to Ruben Studdard albums and/or FM radio. It provides the same overly-compressed, no bass/no treble wall of midrange sludge that one gets on the local Top 40 station. If your idea of listening to music involves unnaturally loud vocals sorta coming through one channel and, somewhere off in the distance under a 20 foot layer of foam insulation, some musical instruments sorta coming through the other channel then the Zune will thrill you. If you like the allegedly cutting highs of Jimmy Page's guitar to be indistinguishable from what is supposed to be the thump of John Bonham's bass drum, the Zune is for you.
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If you don't like being able to hear individual instruments and like a band to sound like a big blob of indistinct noise, run out and get yourself a Zune post-haste.
Yes, I suppose it is the buyer's fault for not learning this information prior to purchase, but asking if a $250 mp3 player has a fucking bass/treble control is a little like asking if that new Mercedes comes with tires. A rational consumer could expect to take those things for granted. Microsoft really nailed the Zune in every other area – the software, the ease-of-use, the format friendliness, and so on. It only falls short in sound quality. For a device the purpose of which is to play music, though, that's problematic, somewhat akin to "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs.
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Lincoln?"
john says:
Perhaps not the software aspect either:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081231-30gb-zunes-prepare-for-new-year-by-locking-up.html
Rob says:
You do not have to buy mp3s for it from Apple, or encode them in a special format to put them on an iPod. You can put any old mp3 on it. If you format it for fat32, you don't even need to use iTunes with it.
dbsmall says:
I inherited my sister's old iPod when she got an iPhone. It's my first portable media device.
While I don't like the interface it's known for (that silly select-wheel or whatever it's called.), I don't mind the device, at all.
It has no EQ, either.
And the "synching" of starred/ratings with Windows is clumsy at best.
I would say that I exclusively use 192-bit-encoded MP3's ripped from my own CD collection…except some folks contend that's illegal.
For a while, I wanted something like a Squeezebox, so I could be all hip and cool and use Ogg Vorbis.
And for a while, I wanted something 32 GB or larger, so I could load my entire CD collection at one time.
But I settled for "free".
Mark says:
Before I joined the Mac crowd I had a ton of non-DRM music on my PC. I never had any problem putting it on my iPod. Yeah, Apple "got me" with iTunes, but why should I care? I would rather spend my money with a company that makes great products/services and become a repeat customer than purchase an incomplete product/service like the Zune.
I suppose I have to hope that something better doesn't come along and kill the iPod/iTunes, but I'm just not really worried about that. It's no different from when everybody started buying CDs instead of cassette tapes and vinyl – I either had to keep all of my old tapes or re-buy the music all over again. How often do you still watch VHS movies instead of DVDs or Blu-Ray? That's just the natural evolution of technology and consumerism.
By the way, if you think that iTunes and its Digital Rights Management are bad, then you have obviously never used Microsoft's Zune store…
Chris says:
That is rough about the Zune. I can't tell you how pissed off I would be if I spent $250 on this and you couldn't control the sound quality.
I've had a 30G Video IPod that has been in great working condition for 2.5 years (and I've listened to it hard). It may be the greatest product I have ever bought. I haven't had any problem formatting MP3's for my IPod. ITunes is a great program for managing music, and it doesn't clash at all with Windows. My IPod has a detailed EQ section, and the sound quality is pretty great.
600G of music: that's a lot of fucking music. I was impressed when I saw that a kid in my dorm had 60G of music. One more thought: there is this program called OurTunes where you can download music from anybody's ITunes that is on your network. OurTunes was fucking sweet in the dorms!
Matthew says:
Yeah, it is true that the only options that are out there for mp3 players all suck amazingly hard in one respect or another. Either they have an absurd user interface, frustrating data management software, or they hold about three songs. There just isn't something on the market that isn't sort of awful. At least, not that I've seen – I have an iPod but I've had it since before the Zune came out, when Apple made the only mp3 players with more than 10 gig capacity.
Go free market capitalism! Stupid people settling for less means I can't get what I want! Woo-hoo!
Cassie says:
As a music lover I'm really happy with the sound quality from my iPod and the accompanying earphones. I never thought this would matter, but they are darn comfortable earphones. I never pay for electronic copies of music and I've never had any trouble putting my ill-gotten mp3s on it. Yeah, you have to use iTunes, but if you ain't buying anything it's just a program to organize your music before you upload it which I'm sure the Zune has as well. It can also look up album info and cover art. No problems being compatible with my PC either. The dark side really isn't that bad… join us, join us… it's warm and comfy and there is long battery life.
kc says:
"I didn’t have to sign up for anything or buy my music from the hardware manufacturer in a format that would only work with its products."
Just to reiterate – you don't have to buy from the iTunes store, you can use almost any audio file format (other than wmv, but who would want to listen to ANYTHING in that shitty sounding god-forsaken format?), including wave or aiff.
A lot of the anti-Ipod info is based on half-truths. Looks like you got suckered on this one and would have been better off with an iPod..which has several EQ choices….