Price: $249. Additional 16-MB flash card: $49; Additional 32-MB card: $89.
Grade: A- (As good as they get for now.)
Bottom line: Innovative, compelling features make this the player to buy.
Sensory Science, an up-and-comer, has put out the best of this bunch with its raveMP player. The raveMP is an eye opener from the instant you first see it. It comes in an unconventional hourglass shape, is slightly larger than the rest of the pack and has
a cool package of features. It arrives with 64 MB of internal storage, and you can expand it to 96 megs. That's around an hour and a half of musical pleasure. (Typically you get about a minute of standard-quality playback per meg, though you can double t
hat if you don't mind lowering the sound quality.)
Like the rest of the units reviewed here, except for the Mplayer3, the
raveMP comes with a parallel-port cable that reduces the download time to some 20 seconds a track. It also comes with a microphone for voice recording, plus audio input and outp
ut jacks. With a pair of RCA cables, you can hook up the unit to your tape player (or record player, if you can find it in the attic) and digitally retread your old music. And the raveMP allows you to download data files onto it, like documents and graphi
cs, which turns it into a very cool portable hard drive. The software includes features that let you keep address books and notes, giving it limited palmtop-PC capabilities. This kind of MP3-palmtop integration is only going to make life better if players
continue down this path.
Sensory Science's RaveMP 2100.