Radio

What makes this device unique from others, is the ability to listen to and record radio. Although it is of course quite possible to just plug in an external radio and record from that - using their system it makes capturing songs on the fly a possibility.

When listening to the radio, it is not always possible to know if you will like the song until it is say 20 or 30 seconds into it - at which point recording would be waste as you will have missed a large chunk of it. This is why Archos have introduced retro-record. This is Archos' buzz-word for a 30 second buffer. If you decide that you do in fact want to record a song up to 30 seconds into it, 30 seconds will already be buffered and ready. This means capturing that latest hit song is a walk in the park.

Storage

In the manual, they quote the following:

300 hours of MP3 music at 128 kbps
450 hours of radio recording at 96 kbps
700 hours of voice recording at 64 kbps
or 20 GB of data.

Now, personally I find that 128kbps is no-where near good enough. The quality is close to CD but not quite. I use a high rated VBR, which means you can expect less than 300 hours. At the end of the day 20gb is 20gb no matter how you look at it - whether this is file storage or MP3's of any bitrate.

<< Back | 1 | | 2 | | 3 | | 4 | | 5 | | 6 | Next >>