Creative Muvo Mix 256MB - Sound Tests and Benchmarks

Sound Tests

Very small ear bud style headphones offer great sound quality, but Ifound they were a little uncomfortable until you get used to them.

Testing out the player, I loaded it up with one song encoded in afew different formats to see which ones sounded the best on theoriginal headphones. I picked Led Zeppelin's "Stairway To Heaven." It'san amazing song and has a wide range of music all in one single track.It's 8 minutes long, so it averages out to be two 4 minute tracks. Ifirst ran it at 64kbps, which is half my normal quality, then at128kbps, and also at a 256kbps.

Listening to the 64kbps version sounds more like listening to aradio station than an MP3 player. The only way I would put songs inthis format would be to increase the storage capacity, sinceapproximately 128 songs can be stored. It averages out to 128 4-minutesongs, which is about 512 minutes of music.

At 128kbps, I got CD quality songs. Most music files on the Internetare encoded in this bit rate, so listening to music at this format willbe the best. Muvo can hold Stairway 30 times, so that's really only 60songs and roughly 240 minutes of music.

At 256kbps, I couldn't really notice any increase in quality beyond128kbps. Also file sizes were enormous. Stairway was a massive 15MBfile, which could only be saved around 15 times that would only be 30regular songs for 120 minutes of music.

Benchmarks

Testing out the drive I planned to see just how fast the drive couldperform transferring a 2MB file to the drive. I used Sandra 2005 and ranthe removable storage benchmark to test the file transfer rate of thedrive. The results were very impressive for extremely small file sizes,but once larger files were transferred, the performance decreased quitea bit. The average data transfer rate was around 1mbps, so loading upsome songs may take a little while longer for larger songs to transfer.This is of course a synthetic benchmark, so take these numbers lightly.There are more factors in running the benchmark than a simple datatransfer, more CPU resources are used, and in real life, a 15MB songseems to finish in a few short seconds.

The problem with this benchmark is that it's also highly dependenton CPU resources and memory as well. So real life performance will besignificantly faster than what the benchmark may show.

Next: Conclusion >>
 

More Mobile Devices Articles
More By Mike Mackenzie