For those users who feel the need to zip through their operas or audio books to the best bits, the rewind and fast-forward audio scan ramps up its speed nicely, depending on how long you hold the control down, allowing you to skip through even the longest recordings with ease. Though you can't bookmark audio, the Fuze will ask you if you would like to resume the last audio book file you accessed from the point where you stopped it. Similarly, if you switch the player off mid-track it will resume at the same place when you switch it back on.
The only slight menu-related glitch we noted was that the successful importing of album artwork seemed a touch random. When transferred onto the player, some folders took their artwork with them, others didn't. This really only bears mention as the Fuze has two settings for viewing content by album, one that shows six albums per screen with no art and one that shows four but each with a thumbnail of the cover. It's a nice idea, but only if you can get the artwork to show up in the first place.
Nice songs - shame about the video
Currently, audio file support is limited to MP3, WMA, Audible and WAV, but a promised firmware support will soon add Ogg Vorbis and Flac to that list. The latter is particularly valuable as SanDisk has long made a song and dance about being the only mp3 player manufacturer to make its own audio chips. Relevant or not, such a claim was a little pointless when its players wouldn't support a broader range of codecs than any other chip maker's offerings.
The Fuze comes without of any bells-and-whistles sound modifiers, making do instead with ten pre-set and one customisable EQ settings. This is one instance of less definitely being more. With the EQ set to Normal, the Fuze pumps out a solid and coherent sound with plenty of bass. Listening to the epically pompous, but still fun, Pandora's Box Original Sin project from Jim Steinman underlined this - from thunderous drum lines, through avalanches of tortured guitars to grand pianos being abused in a way that would make a Steinway engineer cry, the Fuze never missed a step, always presenting a lucid and balanced sound.
A selection of Beethoven piano sonatas performed by Wilhelm Kempff showed the Fuze to be no less talented when it came to serious music, the tone being little short of perfect. In short, the Fuze is easily a match for the Samsung YP-P2 in the sound stakes, and that's quite a compliment in our book.
COMMENTS
re: earphones
Why should I have to cover the cost of semi-average headphones that I am never going to use???? At least if they are junk it is only adding a few pence to the cost of the player. If anything, I wish they didn't include any headphones!
sounds good to me
My old sansa takes forever to power up and refresh database and i had to replace the battery (once)....but that they made VERY easy.
Speaking of very easy...now if I could just try the controls....
IMHO, sounds very good
I had the pleasure of getting the Fuze for myself and it sounds a tad better than a nano a friend of mine has. Using the same headphones (we used a sennheiser px200), the fuze was, literally, music to my ears. However, what really impressed me was the memory expansion. I'm looking forward to Sandisk releasing the 16GB microsdhc card soon. A firmware update supporting OGG would be nice.
Looks good
...and I'm a big fan of the Cowon range. If they do get good OGG/FLAC support, I might be looking at that to replace my loverly D2 (which has 8GB onboard + 16GB SDHC).
The drawbacks with the D2 at present are a slightly flaky database when it comes to indexing the OGG files and really, the device is overpriced - they tend to cost more than similar Apple offerings, and are less styley. Although they sound fabulous - I had great sound out of the box with the D2, and gave up on getting anything good out of the iPod, even with Rockbox and every kind of sound tweak tweaked. The D2 also takes forever to boot when the database needs updating, and it irks me that there isn't a setting for it to automatically resume the music after starting up (it does resume from the track you're playing, but you need to select the Music option and then hit Play).
Assuming the Sandisk offering sounds as good a Cowon beastie, the price is definitely right, it doesn't look fugly, so it'd definitely be an option worth looking into.
Looks like..
..an updated version of my E265. Great player, I would second all the positives you noted. From the review it seems they have cured the only fly in the ointment of the earlier player, the start up time. On my older model, every time it is turned on it refreshes the audio database which means it can take 10 secs or more before the device is usable. If this has been sorted then I will certainly consider a purchase.
