I'm looking to buy an MP3 player, and I want something with about 2+ gigs of flash memory, and good quality sound output. The sound is the most important thing. I've listened to the Ipod and it isn't very good. The ability to drive some good headphones would be nice as well, none of this earbud bullshit.

So essentially, all I really need is a USB memory stick that plays back MP3 and has good quality sound. Is there anything like that available?

Sansa e200, e240, & e280 are good, plus you can expand the storage with MicroSD cards. You can also install rockbox which is a huge bonus imho.

The Sansa Clip looks like it has good quality, but I'm not sure if it lets you just use folders instead of it sorting your music, and it uses a cable for usb. Their stick style player looked to have bad ratings for sound quality. The e200 series doesn't look like it's for me. Too many features that I don't want for too much money. The Clip still sounds cool, but I'd rather just pop it straight into my PC or car stereo rather than using a cable.

I'm digging this Sony NWZ-B105 I found while looking at the Sansa stuff. Supposedly very good quality. When I looked at it on Amazon though, people were reporting some weird issues with it. Apparently it doesn't show up as a USB mass storage device, and sometimes transfers will just cut out.

haw

Well with the e200, with rockbox you can just use folders. The sound quality is arranged by rockbox and sounds great. You can set an EQ and do whatever you want as well. The battery life is also 12 - 16 hours.

As for the clip, I dunno anything about that. My experience with the small players though is you either find a shitty unknown-brand one that breaks or has crappy buttons and an awkward interface, or you have to pay a little more but you get a lot more to upgrade to the more mainstream players.

Oh yeah, stay far away from Sony players as they force you to use shitty Windows software. It's real bad. If you can mod it or rig it somehow then by all means, but it's Sony's software that drags down those players, sorry. Otherwise they do look fantastic. Bought one, then the next day brought one back to the store. But it was a 6GB mini-hard disk based player with an OLED display, not the one you're talking about. I imagine it is the same deal though, as I have had another Sony player that required some different but equally shitty software.

The thing about the Sony players that is the worst though is they say they can play your MP3 and WMA files, but then when you put them on the player, what it really does is convert them into their format before storing it on the player and this takes a long time and plus recoding lossy files really makes the flaws of compression come out in the sound.

I agree that no "mass storage device" support really fucking sucks.

I second the Sansa E series. Have the e-250 and I love it. Rockbox is badass. Check the versions. Some of the newer ones don't work with RB. I got mine for $25 refurbed. Great deal for a 2gb that's expandable.

n2

Wow, where do you get it for that price? After doing more research, it looks like the E200 with rockbox might be the best in terms of functionality, but from what I'm reading, the sound quality from Sansa devices, other than the clip, is rather so-so. Also, like you said, the new V2 models don't support rockbox, but if I could get a V1 for cheap like you did, it wouldn't matter.