Today
As the interest in MP3s keeps growing so does the proliferation of software, and there is now a glut of MP3 players. The choice of player is not an easy one. Logging onto popular MP3 sites, we found extensive lists of players but didn't see a lot of reviews. How can you really know which one is best for you? Does one player sound better than another? We at the Stereo Society decided to do something. We decided to take a cross section of MP3 players on a ‘Consumer Reports’ style test drive. We could utilize our own professional recording facility, one of the most powerful audio production rooms in the world, as our laboratory.

We considered including portable players such as Diamond's Rio Player or Creative's Nomad but decided against it. These portable players are still expensive (around $150) compared with software players (all of which are inexpensive or free) and only hold an hour's worth of music. You can expand the memory with flashcards but they are very expensive, relatively time-consuming to load, and their capacity is a fraction of what you have available on your hard drive. When loading convenience increases and price falls, they will be competitors, but at present they're for enthusiasts only.

The control room was equipped with an iMac G3 DV Special Edition running Mac OS 9 and a Sys PC compatible Pentium Pro 200 running Windows98. The iMac, like all Macintoshes, included a built-in soundcard, but for the PC we installed Sound Blaster Platinum Live! hardware. The audio outputs of the computers and an external CD player went into monitor inputs of our Amek Einstein ‘Super E’ analog mixing console, to facilitate ‘A/B-ing’ (when two or more audio signals are compared by switching back and forth between them). Monitoring was with Yamaha NS-10Ms, B&W 601s and UREI 813Cs speakers. The Yamahas and B&Ws were both powered by a Yamaha PC2602 professional power amplifier with 260 watts per channel, the UREIs by a pair of UREI 6500 power amplifiers 450 watts per channel. To keep our feet on the ground we occasionally monitored from our built-in computer speakers, or a simple but effective system of Styrofoam cups and string. James was wearing khaki shorts and a free white T-shirt with some logo on it and Eric was as smartly dressed as a young Gary Miller, who, incidentally we knew back then and whom our new stereosociety.com remix, Here He Come, Millennium Man, is partially about.

We then chose our audio, a four varied musical styles from our stereosociety catalog of MP3:
1. Cry Tomorrow by The Reds
2. Jungle Jane Has More To Say Mike Thorne's remix of BETTY's Jungle Jane
3. Millennium Man by BETTY and
4. Trio On The Cuff 6 by Johnny Reinhard.

All of the music we used is available here as free MP3 downloads. Free downloads of the same titles are available at Liquid Audio in their format AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) MPEG-2 . These files can also be auditioned , in their entirety, as lower-quality streaming Real or Liquid Audio files. The respective CDs are also available for purchase here (via Amazon.com).

We thought we were ready to go but there were a few issues that needed resolution before we could begin our comparative review.

Firstly, was there a comparative difference between the soundcard of the iMac and the Sound Blaster Platinum Live! equipped PC? We loaded copies of The Reds' Cry Tomorrow CD into both computers and the regular audio CD player and A/B-ed them. While no there were no profound differences between the three sources, we heard that the PC had consistently more output level and a shade more punch than the iMac. We would have to make level adjustment ‘subjective allowances’ for the discrepancies of the two computers in our comparisons.

Also, is there a difference in audio quality between our MP3s, our liquid Audio MPEG-2's and our CD-Audio?

CD-Audio, unsurprisingly, won by a mile. Its frequency response and depth of field was apparent on all three sets of monitor speakers. The MP3 and Liquid files lacked ‘presence’ as compared to CD-Audio, to be expected with the compression compromises. What surprised us was how much better Liquid sounded than MP3, but then it does use 30% less compression. (We suggest that you get your free stereosociety.com downloads from Liquid Audio if you care about quality. Further, the quality of Liquid files is subject to the encoder's choice. We encoded our downloads in AAC MPEG-2, but others may choose not to encode at that quality.) However, despite finishing last, the MP3 format sounded pretty good when it was blasting away in the control room on any speaker configuration.

Obviously, our first decision was to select which players to use from the hundred or so on offer. We chose for comparison multimedia players that we felt had brand-name recognition among the internet community at large, players more popular with MP3 users and also a few newcomers. We limited ourselves to Mac and/or Windows format software (only, as the majority of you aren't using Linux).

We spent a long day downloading players and went for the full version when a paid upgrade was available. When we were finished this is what we had:

Macintosh:
Aqueous Player (Mac)
Destiny Media Player (Mac/Win)
Liquid Player Five (Mac/Win)
MacAST (Mac)
Mplay Media Player (Mac)
MusicMatch Jukebox (Mac/Win)
QuickTime Player Pro (Mac/Win)
RealPlayer Plus 8(Mac/Win)
Sound App PPC (Mac)
Sound Jam MP (Mac)
Windows Media Player (Mac/Win)

Windows:
Creative PlayCenter (Win)
Destiny Media Player (Mac/Win)
Liquid Player Five (Mac/Win)
MusicMatch Jukebox (Mac/Win)
QuickTime Player Pro (Mac/Win)
RealPlayer Plus 8 (Mac/Win)
Sonique Media Player (Win)
Winamp (Win)
Yahoo! Media Player (Win)
Windows Media Player (Mac/Win)

Like true scientists, we developed a list of questions we hoped to answer by our research.

Was there a difference in audio quality? Would speaker selection have an impact on a player’s subjective audio performance? Which player interface or feature made it easy to use, which more difficult? Which player looked cool? Which player sacrificed form over function? Which player had the most features, the most value? It was an ambitious agenda.

The 15 players were subjected to an intense competition, each taking its turn against all comers. We started with the most-used multimedia player, Real Network' s RealPlayer Plus and opened it on the PC and on the iMac. We double-checked to make sure neither player had equalization engaged, if it had that feature (The RealPlayer does) and that the volume controls in both players and in each computer’s Control Panel were set to maximum.

We used the same listening procedure ‘AB-ing’ each of the four songs through the three sets of control room monitors, and occasionally the computer speakers if we had a dead heat. We moved to the next player on the iMac and compared with the RealPlayer. Once the RealPlayer had faced each player in the iMac, we opened the Mac RealPlayer to go against the balance of players exclusive to the PC. Eventually, the RealPlayer (either Mac or Windows) had been tested against the other 14 players. We did the same for the Liquid Player, QuickTime etc., until all of our players had faced each other.

Then we collapsed.

We didn't accomplish all this in one sitting. We split our tests into six three-hour sessions over three days, to avoid ear fatigue. Examination of their software features took place during business hours when we were supposed to be working.

For an informative approach to our MP3 review process please read on by
clicking on the subject links.

An Introduction | A little bit of History | Results and Top Picks

If you would like to jump right in to the player reviews, click on the links below.

Aqeous Player | Audion (new) | Creative PlayCenter | Destiny Media Player
iTunes (new) | Liquid Player Five | MacAST | Mplay Media Player
MusicMatch Jukebox | QuickTime Player Pro | RealPlayer Plus 8 | Sonique Media Player
Sound App PPC (Power PC) | SoundJam MP Plus | UltraPlayer (new) | Winamp
Windows Media Player | WinRip (new) | Yahoo! Media Player