I purchased an open box Zen tonight for the purpose of comparing it with the the 3g ipod.

First I wanted to correct a mistake I made in an earlier post where I said the new ipod doesn't sound as loud as the old one. This was not fair because even though the same file was used on both, the copy on the new ipod had been mp3gained down a some.

Now on the results. This partains only to the sound quality and not the other features, but here are some brief notes. The Zen does not have a line out. That alone is probably enough to keep me from owning it. It does allow custom equalization(4 band starting at 100Hz and ending at 12K Hz. Unfortunately this is not really enough control. The selecting thumb wheel is nice, but the user interface is nowhere near as clean as the ipod. Duh, big surprise there! The anodized case is really much nicer than the ipod and has a nice industrial look and is very scratch resistant, but the ipod is super tiny and has that slick look to it. It's sexy.

I was fully expecting the Zen to blow away the ipod on sound. Unfortunately, this was not the case. The Zen exhibits the exact same problem with EQ that the ipod does. Clipping occurs in the same way unless the global gain on the file is reduced to compensate. This means that just like the ipod, you could listen at very low volumes with an eq setting that boosts bass and you'd still get clipping since the clipping comes from sample volume overflowing. Using mp3gain to bring the gain down and then turning the volume up on the headphone amp compensates and allows me to remove the clipping caused by the EQ, but maximum volume is limited somewhat.

Using the same file(I really mean it this time) on both the ipod and the zen with repeated a/b comparisons show that the zen is no louder on maximum volume than the ipod. Reports say the zen is supposed to be 50mw + 50mw, but I cannot find this in any literature from Creative Labs. I wonder if third party reports were just assuming 50mw because the Nomad II and III do have this level of output. Nowhere in any of the spec sheets does the zen say 50mw.

The final results are that if I have to choose, I'd have to say the ipod hands down.

I really want an ipod that has hardware eq.