From: Arno Wald <arno.wald_at_netcologne.de>
Date: Sat, 02 Feb 2008 15:21:39 +0100

Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
>> The only problem I have is a noticeable noise mine makes during quiet
>> passages and between songs.
>
> I don't here any of this on my E280. That's strange.
> Sound is crystal clear without any background noise.

What kind of headphones are you using?

I am using "KOSS - The Plug" and have this background noise very
clearly. It is not a big problem when listening to music while sitting
in a train, because there are enough other natural noises around. But in
a quiet surrounding it is very annoying IMHO. I think about buying a
higher impedance headphone or do hope that rockbox does get usable on a
cowon D2 in some weeks. I guess that this player has much better
hardware (but is three times more expensive).

Besides this background noise issue the e280 is a really great player.
It is very cheap (108 EUR for the 8GB+radio version). It is small and
seems robust. The original firmware is a crap. It is missing a file
browser and ogg support. But driven by rockbox it is very recommendable.

One other drawback: The USB support in rockbox is not yet working. You
have to boot the original firmware (by holding the left-key while
booting) for being able to load music files onto the player. This means
you have to wait 1 or 2 minutes because the original firmware does block
the GUI while it does update the mp3-tag database if it is the first
time you restart the original firmware after having loaded new music.

The missing USB-support is a problem, too, when using high capacity
cards. The original firmware can only handle normal micro-SD cards (if I
am right up to 2GB). The newer micro-SDHC (currently up to 8GB) can be
used under rockbox. But because rockbox cannot load music on it, you
have to use a card-reader to store music onto the card. Not a big
problem, but it would be great if the rockbox USB-support would come one
day.

Ciao,
Arno
Received on 2008-02-02