In terms of format support and jukebox support, the TrailAudio is pretty backcountry, as it offers no support for DRM WMA files and isn't recognized by Windows Media Player 10.0 for automatic syncs. The HighGear's playback interface could also use some help. You can drag file folders onto it via Windows Explorer, but the player collapses them into one giant list of tunes that takes forever to scroll through. Fortunately, HighGear reconciles these grievances a bit by stocking the TrailAudio with a radio, as well as FM and line-in recording capabilities.
The FM radio tunes in 0.05 increments, an unnecessarily detailed amount since no radio station frequencies rest on a 0.05. Instead, the extra stops merely waste time. The FM quality was acceptable, as was the FM recording; we encoded the radio into a 128Kbps MP3 file, but you can adjust the recording settings to various bit rates.
The under-the-ear-and-around-the-neck headphones did a fine job staying clipped to our head while we bounced around on a mountain bike. Unfortunately, they sounded awful, spouting thin, thready audio. And on throbbing anthems such as the Dropkick Murphys' "The Rocky Road to Dublin," they started distorting at just past half volume. A better pair of earbuds vastly improved the sound and cleared up the distortion problems, though audio quality was by no means stellar. Also unimpressive was the TrailAudio's molasses-slow transfer time of 0.7MB per second over USB 2.0. Battery life fared better at 15.9 hours, almost 4 hours longer than HighGear's own estimate.
Editor's note: We have changed the rating in this review to reflect recent changes in our rating scale. Click here to find out more.
What You'll Pay
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