Ever since Walter Mossberg wrote a favorable review of an Archos PMP several years ago in the Wall Street Journal I have been interested in buying one of these players. I lucked out and bought a used one from a local fellow who owned three Archos PMPs, his model 504 being the oldest, which was why he was selling it. He obligingly powered it up and played samples of music and video and I was satisfied.
I use it to enjoy music and videos when I travel and also to record live performances of my wife's concert band, and also our neighborhood "garage band". I use the built in mic and the 504 allows me to record either in WAV or MP3 at my choice of sampling rates. I use 44Kbhtz/sec and I get very nice quality recordings. I download them to my laptop and edit the recordings there.
There are several ways to browse and select MP3 songs to play and I like the quality with the Archos ear buds which have a convenient volume control on the wire.
When my wife and I travel by plane, I will sometimes watch a favorite film on my 504. The screen has big, sharp and vibrant color and I can usually hear the audio above the sound of the jet engines...but the sound could stand to be about 10db louder.
Knowing it contains a delicate hard drive drive, I treat my 504 carefully and only once did it freeze up. The green indicator light told me the unit was on, but the screen was black and blank. A quick search on Google turned up the undocumented location of the reset button on the motherboard under the battery. I held down the little button for 30 seconds, and my 504 was restored to normal full operating condition.
Although I was tempted to replace the 40GB drive with a bigger one, I have decided to wait. I located an on line forum which outlined how to change hard drives, but it seemed slightly risky to me, so I will wait until the present 40GB drive fails and then, with nothing to lose, I will try to install a new bigger drive. The 40GB of storage space does, however, seem adequate to me. I have many feature movies and many albums of MP3 music stored on the 40GB drive with room to spare. I delete older files and just add new ones when I tire of the selection available.
My 504 does not feature wifi, but it can display PDF files and TXT files in case I would ever want to try reading an ebook on it.
If you are interested in the Archos PMPs, I would suggest you read as many of the reviews here and elsewhere, then shop around for a used one so you don't sink $300 or more into a product for which there is NO technical support. Again I will say that I am very pleased with mine.Get more detail about Archos 504 40GB Portable Digital Media Player and Recorder (500869).
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