iRiver products, are they any good?

2003-09-09 19:54:03

A friend of mine recently bought an iRiver portable player, the iFP-390T. I'm looking around for a decent portable, although I haven't really kept up with what's available lately. I'm not really familiar with iRiver's products, or he company, although I have read a number of posts here at HA about them. I haven't come across anything really negative, and it seems they have good products and customer support.

I really like the design and capabilities of the iFP-390T, enough that I'm ready to buy one soon. For anyone reading this who has an iRiver player, are you satisfied with it?

My main requirements, in order of importance:

- sound quality
- user interface (must be logical and well-designed)
- size
- capacity

The FM tuner and mono recording are nice, but not very important features for me.

I'm in the middle of encoding all my CD's in MPC q7, and I would love to see Ogg Vorbis support in whatever I buy. WMA is useless to me. It seems like iRiver is working to add Ogg Vorbis in a future firmware upgrade for many of their players, so this is good enough for me. If they don't add Vorbis, then it'll be Lame APS (or maybe 192 ABR).

I really wanted an iPod, but cost is the biggest factor in not buying one. Other suggestions, anyone?

iRiver products, are they any good?

Reply #1 – 2003-09-10 00:03:48

iRiver is considered by many of us to make some of the best portable MP3 players out there, especially their portable MP3 CD Player line which is considered probably the best in the industry. Firmware updates are released frequently to fix any bugs and add new features. The sound quality is the best I have heard from a portable player. Prices are maybe a little above-average but you get a whole lot in return. User interface is pretty good as well.

iRiver has been working on Ogg Vorbis support for their players for a very long time, although they haven't perfected it yet to work with their current line of players (Ogg consumes a lot more CPU then MP3 does). No one is exactly sure which players will be upgradeable to Ogg Vorbis when the time comes, but there will probably be some that you can.

iRiver products, are they any good?

Reply #2 – 2003-09-10 00:06:34

Well, it could be said that iRiver was the brand that 9 out of 10 HydrogenAudio members preferred...
At least while they tought Vorbis was coming... 

But, really, iRiver's products all deliver in ease of use and sound quality. And if there's ever any support for Vorbis or MPC, there's a good chance it will be on one of these (based on better-than-average customer support and possibility of "modified" firmwares). But I would not hold my breath, my -aps files are enough for my portable needs.

So there you go.

iRiver products, are they any good?

Reply #3 – 2003-09-10 01:54:48

What about the Rio Nitrus? One Head-Fier already has one and he thought it sounded superior to the 3 gen iPod. The future Karma will reportedly have Ogg and FLAC support (but your back to iPod prices).

Here.

Review.

iRiver products, are they any good?

Reply #4 – 2003-09-10 08:59:57

I would like to recommend the Ibead MP100/MP110 as a cheaper alternative to the iRivers. It is supposed to be based on the chipset as iRiver and the tests I have seen tests that says that the sound quality is equally good. In addition to being cheaper it is also smaller, wheighs less, and need no cable to plugin to the USB-port. No Ogg support is planned due to that the CPU wasn't powerful enough, and therefore my bet is that iRivers IFP series won't support Ogg either. I.e. if they indeed use the same CPU as I have heard...

However the headphones that comes with the Ibead are much worse than those bundled with the iRiver. The iRiver comes with Sennheiser MX300 which are good plugs. But even if you buy Ibead+Sennheiser MX400 (even better), you are still paying considerably less...