An HD player is nicest but costs a lot more. They also tend
to be battery-hungry. I think I'd rather carry something less
expensive and and less techy-looking, that attracts less attention.

The iRivier HD players run up to 16 hours on a charge. They're small, and have a
corded remote that lets you operate them while they remain hidden in a pocket.

If you're worried about sound quality, an HD unit makes more sense, because you
can transfer 25 CDs to a 20GB drive as uncompressed WAV files, _without_ having
to use lossy encoding.


I have read several reviews on the web as well as posts to relevant
newsgroups. It looks like the iRiver IHP 120 could meet my needs.
However sound quality seems to be an issue
(http://www.whooper.co.uk/iRiveriHP-120.htm) as well as gapless
playback.

The majority of listeners who've posted comments have strongly preferred the
iRiver to the iPod. On its own, through good headphones, I find the sound of the
iRiver to be exceptionally clean, transparent, and natural. There is nothing
about its sound that is immediately "wrong-sounding." It is absolutely NOT
either "tiny" or "tinny."

I listened to the first 10 minutes of the first act of "Die Walkure" on the
iHP-120 and the Sony D-555 Discman, using Sennheiser 580 Precision 'phones,
switching at appropriate points. (I have no idea what the "best-sounding"
Discman is or was (if there is/was such a model), but the D-555 was certainly
the fanciest Discman ever made.)

Both "sounded good." However, I judged the D-555 to be brighter,
harder-sounding, and sometimes a bit "edgy." The iHP-120 gave a noticeably
better presentation of the recording's ambience -- it was more coherent and
"related" better to the direct sounds.

I'm thoroughly familiar with this recording played through Apogee Divas driven
by Krell electronics. Though neither the Sony nor the iRiver's playback through
the Sennheisers matches the sound of my main system, neither is either in any
way a grossly inferior presentation. The iRiver is especially pleasing and
realistic.

This reviewer is almost certainly dead wrong. I'm a fussy listener (I used to
review for Stereophile, and I've made many live recordings of classical music),
and I've never owned to any portable audio device that has given me more
listening pleasure than the iHP-120.

The iRiver does not have gapless playback. This is a problem ONLY with operas or
other works with tracks inserted at points where there aren't natural breaks in
the music. I've asked iRiver to fix this (it's theoretically doable by altering
the firmware), but gotten no reply. You can correct this yourself with software
that lets you splice WAV files, or by transferring each CD as a single large
file.


I'm not sure what the gapless playback issue is. The iRiver,
like a lot of these gadgets, has an internal, non-removable
lithium-ion battery, and I think I'd find that intolerable.

It would be nice to have a removable battery like a cell phone's, but then the
unit wouldn't be quite so small. The real issues are how often the battery needs
replacement (iRiver claims it's good for five years, even with daily use -- I
find this hard to believe), and the cost/difficulty of replacing it.


If you're travelling around, you may not always have easy access
to AC power for recharging...

The iRiver comes with a tiny universal charger that works from 90V to 250V. I
don't know if they have a car charger. But it you're "travelling around," you
probably have an inverter.