Insignia Pilot with Bluetooth user reviews (8GB)

2.5 stars

"Great potential player with a fatal flaw" on December 22, 2007 by dkarageo

Pros: Great list of features; good screen; price.

Cons: Poor audio quality.

Summary: I have to say I really wanted to love this player. The feature list on this thing is drool worthy, but I'm sorry to say after buying it today, it's going back to Best Buy. Why? The sub-par audio quality. One would think that by this time, good audio quality in an mp3 player would be a given, a no-brainer. But apparently not. I compared the sound from the Insignia Pilot to my old Rio Forge and my Creative Zen Vision M; it wasn't even a contest. My small, AAA battery powered, five year old Rio sounded better than the Pilot.
Throughout most tracks ripped at high bitrate mp3 via a LAME encoder, I distinctly heard pops and crackles on the Pilot. Both the ZVM and the Rio also had 'bigger' sound. Some of the audio tracks on the Pilot seemed 'muffled', if that gives you an idea.
And I can't understand it, because if the Sansa Clip can reportedly pump out fantastic audio in a tiny $50 player, why can't Insignia's premium player do the same?