Can you help with any of these questions?

MP3 players Sansa Fuze
1

hello,

 i have the 4 gig fuze w/ an 8 gig micro card.  relatively new to the whole mp3 player thing so please bear w/ me. i have searched the forums for a lot of my questions in this post.

my limited understanding is as follows.

wmp isnt as good as media monkey

mp3 compression doesnt sound as good as wma at same bitrate.

most users put daily music and all pictures on the internal hd of the fuze, while putting not very listened to music and video on external card. 

that just about covers that.

what i have

4 gig fuze w/ an 8 gig card.

a cheap mini stereo double male plug to go from my fuze to my axillary in on my sony cd player. 

sony cd player w/ infinity speakers 

 i am only using 3 1/2 gigs with prolly 1 more gig of music and pictures to go.

i am using wma 345kbps

i am not going to come anywhere near running out of room unless i put a dvd on it.

my questions

 why would my sound be so much less volume on my cd player than my computer or a cd in my car? i dont max my cd player out. my loudness threshold collapses before i lose the quality of the sound in cd mode. but when i put my fuze through my cd player in my car i lose music integrity before i come anywhere near the desired decibel.

i have the seeting for sound on loud and i have tried w/ my cd player nearly maxed and then increasing the volume on the fuze. i have also started w/ the volume of the fuze up and then increasing the volume on my cd player. is it my ghetto radio shack mini stereo plugs? is it just something that happens in the going from one player to another? the sound distorts before  i max out my cd player volume where as before it would be plenty loud before sound quality was lost. i have changed all the treble and bass settings on both fuze and sony… btw i am not listening to rap or hip hop… so its not big bass drops. i listen to metal and oldschool punk. lots of treble and most of the bass is in the form of double bass drums and such. 

  i have a few days off from work this week so i can delete my music and re rip to another format?

i am not worried about using up too much space nor am i concened w/ the time i would have to spend in putting my music back on my pc then my fuze.

so should i just start over w/ media monkey and rip to a different format? should i buy new ministereo plugs? any other suggestions would be great too! all my music is original cd’s only have got a few albulms off amazon in mp3 so i can just put in a cd and rip while doing household duties. i want the best sound i can get. not worried about size and or space… should i rip at wav or lossless and then encode to lame or whatever? help! thanks in advance! 

Message Edited by oftenfacetious on 10-12-2009 12:53 PM

2

Personally, I hear no difference between MP3 and WMA so I always stick with MP3 since it is a universal format and works on just about anything. Plus if you have no other Digital Rights Managed files you can keep the Fuze in MSC mode making it possible to drag/drop files to it from your computer rather than using Windows Media Player, Rhapsody, etc. I also rip at 320K bit rate, and use the Constant Bit Rate mode rather than Variable Bit Rate. The Fuze doesn’t seem to like VBR files too well. 

If you don’t mind having two copies of everything, you can use a FLAC program to rip your CD’s to the PC for perfect digital copies, then convert these to MP3 for the Fuze. 

Since the headphone jack on the Fuze is not a true “line out”, you will have some compatibility problems when plugging into a line in or aux input on a car stereo, etc. Play with the volume control on the Fuze to get the cleanest sound, but be warned that the sound level won’t be the same as a CD at the same volume setting, thus it may never be as loud. Also, switching from playing the Fuze to a CD may result in a sudden increase in volume that could damage your speakers, and your ears. Always turn the volume of the stereo down before switching inputs. If you are so inclined, there is a way to build a cable that plugs into the PC interface of the Fuze that supposedly gives you a true line output for which you can find the plans somewhere on this forum. I don’t know if it’s worth the effort, however. 

3

 

oftenfacetious said:

 

a cheap mini stereo double male plug to go from my fuze to my axillary in on my sony cd player.
sony cd player w/ infinity speakers

my questions
why would my sound be so much less volume on my cd player than my computer or a cd in my car? i dont max my cd player out. my loudness threshold collapses before i lose the quality of the sound in cd mode. but when i put my fuze through my cd player in my car i lose music integrity before i come anywhere near the desired decibel.

 

oftenfacetious,

To add to qualityaudio’s excellent reply:

So you have another person’s experience, here’s mine.  First off, my Fuze’s volume is set to high in the system settings.  If I connect the Fuze’s headphone out to the aux line in of my amplifier, I have to crank the volume on the Fuze to max to get reasonable volume out of the amplifier.  The same thing happens when I connect the Fuze to my car’s FM transmitter.  The audio does not seem to distort in either case.  But, as we all know, this is very dangerous if folks forget to crank the volume on the Fuze down, insert earbuds (IEMs) into their ears and then plug the earphones into the Fuze.  We’re talking blown out ear drums here.

Regarding the car’s FM transmitter, even with the Fuze’s volume adjusted to max I have to turn up the volume on the car radio a bit to get the same volume as a regular FM broadcast.  Then if I pause the playback, I can hear a slight low level static sound, mainly because of turning up the volume on the car radio.  If I set the volume on the car radio to just right for a FM broadcast, then the Fuze music is a bit too soft but I can’t hear the static when I pause the Fuze.  I’m using a Monster FM transmitter by the way.

Regarding the line out cable mod that qualityaudio referred to, I read the thread that deals with it and the conclusion I get is that the audio level out from the modified cable is the same as from the headphone jack with the volume cranked all the way up.  So the advantage of the cable mod appears to be not having to crank the volume on the Fuze all the way up and supposedly slightly better audio quality (which I know I won’t hear).  There is no advantage as far as the “audio level” to an amplifier or FM transmitter.  (Gurus, if I’m wrong here, please chime in.)

CONCLUSION:
My conclusion from all of this is that I’m going to adjust the level of all of the mp3 files that I load into the Fuze to the maximum level just prior to clipping.  Normally I set my audio levels to an average level of -12 db for all my audio.  At -12 db, the peaks are well below the zero db clipping level.  This is an industry standard that I learned when I used to do wedding and slide show productions professionally.  But for the Fuze, I don’t think it’s enough for connecting to line inputs on amplifiers and FM transmitters.  It won’t negate having to crank the volume on the Fuze all the way up when connecting to line-in inputs but it should help sufficiently for higher levels into those devices.

Thanks for your post which led to my research and conclusion for line-in connections,
Sky  (A new Fuze owner)

4

I forgot to mention that I also tested using an iRiver FP-795 MP3 player.  The results were the same as those using the Fuze.  I had to crank the volume on the iRiver up to get decent volume on from the amplifier and the FM transmitter.  So this problem is not unique to the Fuze.

Sky

5

thats good info. thanks to both of you!