October 24, 2006 9:02 PM PDT
Archos 504: 160 raw gigs in your pocket
On Wednesday, Archos makes official the availability of its 504 series of PVPs, which actually have been available for days.
The 504, which sports the same gorgeous 4.3-inch wide-screen display as the sleek 604, blends excellent video playback performance with gigantic drive capacities--including the monster 160GB version (enough for, say, about 50 Amazon Unbox movies and room for a few thousand songs).
Check out our complete take in the 504 review.
But if, like me, you have been craving a music player with huge storage, as I have, then you might be sorely disappointed.
1) Looking at the release notes, you see early on with the firmware they had to fix clicks and pops when starting, and between, tracks. They seemed to have fixed that but how long has Archos been producing media players and they still can't come out with a player with clean playback without a firmware fix. My mother can make a player that doesn't click and pop.
2) Firmware 1.2.something claims true gapless playback. That is a complete lie and they won't admit it and apparently don't care. Listen to a current iPod and then the same tracks on the Archos. You will see that the stutter between tracks is quite evident on the Archos and gapless playback does not exist on the unit.
3) The hard drive on this player is quite noisy through headphones when starting up a playlist or even when just viewing photos one by one. The whir is quite evident. Not a biggie but still another indication of the company's lack of concern for the sound end of things.
4) This is the item that forced me to return this player. Archos advertises 80,000 songs on the 160GB drive with WMA 64 kbps encoding (obviously more like 40,000 using MP3 128kbps encoding). I have a nearly 20,000 track library which is too big given overhead and my bit rate to put on an 80 GB iPod. I can copy these tracks on to the Archos with tons of room to spare for lots of photos and video.
Oh, but no, the ArcLibrary that indexes the songs, photos, etc, can't seem to handle libraries with more than about 9500 entries. What? On a device with 160 GB of space? Yup - straight from support who also said, well, the tracks are still on the player. Oh yes they are, if I want to browse through the hard drive without the advantage of artist, album, etc. tag organization. I mean, I was able to fit nearly 13,000 tracks on an 80 GB iPod with no problem and it could read all the tags and sort just fine. But no, Archos, this beacon of pmp innovation gives you 160 GB of storage but only lets you index less than 10,000 entries. That goes for the index of photo thumbnails and videos too. Given my large music library, only a small handful of my hundreds of photos appear listed when I look under the Photos icon from the main page.
Perhaps these things will be fixed, eventually, as it seems like they are releasing new firmware every week - another reason why I cringe at the Archos name. They just seem so incapable of putting out a workable player without spending months with us as guinea pigs while they try to fix all the errors they must have clearly seen.
This is a huge comment but I hope some people read it and heed my warning to stay away from Archos if you have large music libraries unless you like spending most of your time on the browse screen.
- Almost there....
- by davidriley32 October 26, 2006 11:24 AM PDT
- Slap a touchscreen, web browser and wifi...and you got something...
- Like this Reply to this comment
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- That would be the Archos 604 wifi
- by kencva October 26, 2006 2:27 PM PDT
- Like this
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