Mrs H is keen to buy one of the above for long walks (music / podcasts). Online reviews are head-scrambling -hundreds of 5-star reviews plus hundreds of 1-stars for the same items. Anyone got any recommendations?
Advice – MP3 player / DAB radio
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There are not many pocket DAB radios. By far the best is the Roberts Sports DAB 5 (£60) but it doesn’t do mp3 playback.
https://www.robertsradio.com/en-gb/portable/sportsdab5#sportsdab5
There are plenty of mp3 players but with FM radio, not DAB.
You might end up with two devices, or play the mp3 files on a phone if she has one. I imagine even the cheapest mobile phone nowadays plays mp3.
I can’t even find a Fiio with DAB.
Portable DAB radios used to have a reputation for eating lots of battery power. Possibly why portable mp3 player radios tend to be FM-only.
I saw two different pocket-size mp3/FM/DAB ones on sale at Amazon. One for £35 and one for £56. Both have very mixed reviews, the £35 one scoring better than the £56 one on quality/reliability.
FM+mp3 is much more common, as Steve says.
I assume Mrs H wants something pocket-size to use with earbuds or headphones.
Another option, which does assume ownership of a smartphone is to use the BBC sounds app and only listen to already downloaded radio shows when out walking.
Or stream them live through the app
How about something like the Sandisk Clip Sports for the mp3 playback? I use one for chores/gardening, is sounds great (even plays lossless), plenty good enough for podcasts. Rechargeable battery is built in, comes with a radio, too – although FM only, of course.
DAB radios used to eat batteries, as Mike says, but not anything like as much as they did. DAB has had 25 years of development now. DAB is much more complex than FM, so even the latest most-power-efficient DAB radio uses more juice than the equivalent FM one.
Of course, it is all relative – a DAB portable will last for weeks on a single charge, unlike a smart phone which might only last hours.
I bought summat a few months ago. Undoubtedly cheap and nasty but does the job… And it’s no longer available.
https://amzn.eu/d/6TCnhOF for reference.
I didn’t find the field of DAB and MP3 player very broad to be honest.
Get on Popmaster, win it and get a wind-up DAB radio. Result!
And then there’s the eternal glory …
Thanks all – I should have specified it’s either / or re: MP3 players (with/without FM radio) and DAB radio. Mrs H, like me, isn’t a mobile phone person though she has a work one and uses it for podcasts out walking at the mo. She has a low quality MP3 player but its storage is rubbish. I’ll pass on the suggestions… 🙂
…Can’t you just use your phone?
Mrs H has gone to the trouble of manually transferring her music from CD to MP3 (a year or two back) – the problem has been finding a half decent MP3 player to put it on. She bought one and it took only a handful of albums. Very difficult to trust online reviews. She uses her work mobile for DLing Radio 4 podcasts at present, but would like to find an MP3 player that isn’t a piece of crap.
In that case Steve’s suggestion of the Sandisk Clip Sports Go is probably the one to get.
The only trouble with it is the fairly limited memory of 32GB.
You might be better off with something that can take a micro-SD card for extra storage.
Let me have another think.
Right, so I bought Mrs F one of these to pair with the BlueTooth speaker she listens to when she takes a bath. It’s a tenner more expensive than the Sandisk. I’ve just given it a spin.
Android-based, 4″ touch screen, solidly-built, FM radio, 16GB inbuilt memory, micro-SD card up to 1TB.
Headphone drive is fine for podcasts but does not go as loud, nor with such deep bass, as the Sandisk (which is unusually good on both counts). FM radio has RDS station ID and is fine on strong stations (I only tried it indoors). No DAB radio. The built-in music player app is fine, but it has BT and WiFi, presumably can load the app of your choice (I haven’t tried).
Thanks Fento – one to consider, as is Mike’s recommendation…
Sounds like it might be. I’ll place the thread in front of her when she reappears from the latest long walk!
Just bear in mind that the best radio station in the world is FIP. So make sure you’ve got that.
Absolutely. I’ve been listening to them to wake up to every morning for the last 10 years or so. They’ve introduced me to tons of brilliant music over the years
FIP?
It’s a French radio station with really eclectic playlist but which makes perfect sense, and occasionally a mademoiselle will pop up and coo some French about the state of the payage at St. Arnauld or something, which is always a treat too (the cooing, not the payage).
My kitchen internet radio is permanently set to FIP and I shall shortly be firing it up to do some cooking.
https://www.radiofrance.fr/fip
Merci, @Twang.
It really is eclectic, isn’t it? Actually, the whole of Radio France’s output looks really good. If my French was a bit better, I’d probably be adding a four-part podcast on Herman Melville to my playlist too.
De rien @yorkio, I lived there for 6 years and picked up FIP as my local alimentation always had very cool music playing and finally I asked the proprietor which station was and he simply grunted “FIP”. Funnily enough I was listening to a podcast with Halestorm’s guitarist – out of Cleveland – and he was saying they play it all the time as the next track is always great and always completely unexpected.
Maybe the fentonmeister can tell me if I’m wrong these days, but in my limited exposure to DAB I came to the conclusion that it’s crap – essentially a tech solution in search of a problem – due to the fractious nature of its signal receiveability when you’re out and about.
DAB is essentially mp3 quality – better than AM. DAB+ is essentially m4a quality – better than FM. This is very similar to the “HD” stream the Beeb use for Sounds. Sadly, not every station broadcasts DAB+.
The main benefit of DAB/DAB+ for mobile is it requires much less transmit power* than FM for a given area. Of course, the flipside of lower broadcast power is worse signal on the fringes of the reception area. Where the FM signal gets hissy and receivers switch to mono, the DAB signal breaks up into unlistenable digital garbage.
(*) Overall energy reduction impacted by the increased power consumption of DAB radios over FM.
I’m ready for a snooze!
I might have mentioned it before, but I am very dull.
You might be dull but you are very well informed.
I have some Cambridge Audio equipment that’s not been used for 15 years which I will ask your advice on once I can be bothered to find out which models they are.
I became a professional engineer because of my love for music, my ability to fix broken radios (the sales of which funded my record collection) with a soldering iron my grandfather gave me, and a schoolboy work placement at a local hi-fi factory.
I’m not sure which came first, the dullness or the nerdery. The pedantry came later, I think.
Unlistenable digital garbage – sounds like the music the young people listen to nowadays eh? Eh??
Not half as good as the unlistenable analogue garbage we listened to when I were a lad.
Have you considered going the Astell & Kern route? I’ve had my little lossless AK70 player for several years now, and it is utterly brilliant, and it will play MP3s just as well as wavs etc. (with a rictus grin of distaste upon its polisched screen).
…or you could buy a Fiio…
Don’t really follow this, she has a phone to listen to podcasts but doesn’t want to use same phone to listen to mp3s or radio. Not sure which DAB stations she would be interested in and aren’t they all available as internet radio anyway? Thought DAB was likely being phased out but I may be wrong.
I didn’t think DAB had a future once streaming radio gained ground, but I may be wrong as the station I am on has moved heaven on earth to get on the the local DAB network. I think it is one of things you have to be on otherwise people think you aren’t serious, but I still wonder if it will last. It may be that FM (VHF in old money ) gets switched off I suppose.
The original plan was to switch off FM when more than 50% of listening was via DAB. It happened years ago, but the cost of DAB receivers is still an order of magnitude higher than FM, and the current gov’t aren’t stupid enough (can you imagine?) to trigger another public backlash.
Streaming radio is much better at home, but the infrastructure is not yet there in the UK to support mobile reception.
No static at aaaallll… Just a lot of bubbling
I’m just the messenger, Dai – I’m not sure why Heather is considering a DAB radio. Maybe she will no longer do so after all this advice.
I don’t think she can load her music on to her phone (it’s a work phone, there may be aspects disabled plus, definitely, her work phones have to be periodically returned/upgraded – and no arguing; neither of us owns a personal mobile phone nor wish to own one). We just have to accept that she would prefer to have a portable MP3 player – the question being, what one is any good?
How about an iPod Touch, no phone gubbins but apps etc. Then the world is your lobster.
32GB storage, about the same as the Sandisk above, at a bargain price of, um, £185.
Yeah I’m not sure it’s the best advice I’ve ever given, plus, you know, Apple.
They stopped making them some time ago, so picking up a new one is going to be a bit tricky. It does mean that you may be able to find one at a clearance price somewhere, if lucky.
Unless you have a mate with a barely used one. **Whistles**
DAB is only used in most countries of Europe, plus South Korea, Australia and a few other scattered places in North Africa and the Middle East. Hence the lack of DAB portable devices from certain manufacturers as the technology is not used in North America, China or Japan.
Mrs H was potentially interested in the DAB thing for accessing non BBC talk radio shows. She’s not really interested in music radio – her own collection of music + podcasts / talk radio is the thing.
She found someone locally selling a Sandisk second-hand via Facebook yesterday, messaged asked ‘is it still available?’ and was told ‘I’m fed up with you people, clear off’. Weird.
At the moment, the Sandisk is looking like the best bet, all things considered.