Creative Nomad Jukebox 3
Creative's grand old man of the hard-drive based Mp3 player market continues to impress.The Nomad Jukebox 3 is Creative's grand old man of the Windows-compatible hard disk based MP3 players, and compared to the smaller Zen and iPods it's beginning to show its age.
The Jukebox 3's connectivity model is an interesting one, in that it supports both USB and Firewire connectivity. Unfortunately, the USB connectivity in the Jukebox 3 is still USB 1.1 only. Combine that with a 20GB hard drive and you'll need an awful lot of patience to fill the drive completely. The dual connectivity model would also be more compelling if the Nomad Jukebox 3 supported Macs, but it doesn't. While USB is everywhere in the PC world, Firewire is considerably less common, and we'd recommend figuring in the price of a Firewire card to the total cost of the Jukebox 3.
At just under 300gm with the battery installed, the Nomad Jukebox 3 is one of the heavier players in our roundup, and it's also one of the largest, with a form factor reminiscent of a regular portable CD player. Front facing buttons control the majority of the Jukebox 3's functions, with a scroll wheel located on the side for menu selection. Irritatingly, there's no hold switch on the unit at all. The unit can be put into hold via menu selection, but this entails multiple button presses, which can be annoying if you just need to quickly adjust volume on the fly.
One thing that the Nomad Jukebox 3 is brimming with is audio enhancement features, which is something you'd expect coming from a company that specialises in PC Audio hardware. You can adjust sound settings to emulate a number of environments -- we're still wondering how many people listen to MP3 files in their bathrooms, but at least now we know what it might sound like. Sound time scaling can be adjusted without messing up the pitch of a particular track and the Smart Volume feature tailors the sound for further noisy environments, so you won't be faced with a train carriage full of angry commuters who didn't wish to share your particular musical tastes.
The Nomad Jukebox 3 has one other trick up its sleeve, namely digital recording via analogue or digital connections. This is ideal for recording cassettes or LPs direct to the hard drive -- and then out to whatever medium you like -- although there's always the copyright issues that you'd have to overcome here. It's also microphone compatible, so you could use the Jukebox as a somewhat bulky digital recorder.
While Creative hasn't updated the Jukebox in the same timely manner as the Zen or Apple's iPod, it's still a very good player with excellent playback characteristics. At AU$799 it's cheaper than the Zen with the same storage capacity, so unless you need the Zen's smaller form factor and as long as you're already Firewire-equipped we'd tend to suggest the Jukebox 3 as the superior alternative.
Creative Nomad Jukebox 3
Company: Creative Australia
Price: AU$799
Distributor: Selected resellers
Phone: (02) 9666 6500
2%
4%
Hi! I recently put a Sony MZ-N510 on layby of $350. It's my first update sine a discman. Should I keep it or find another one? Any comments are more than welcome! Thanks!