WOW - the TG01 is one hell of an mp3 player

[Guest SteveYorks]

I've owned a Sony S639 player for the past year, which by all accounts is a very good player having the renowned Sony signature of musicality about it. Anyone hanging around the Head-Fi forums may also have noted that a few people say there is little or no difference between this and the top of the range Sony X series. And given the laws of diminishing returns in the audiophile world I for one can believe this. I'll be comparing the TG01 to this player.

The IEM's I have are the Phonak Audeo PFE. Again these are highly rated in the Head-Fi forums. They cost around £130 if memory serves and by many accounts hold up well against iem's such as the Shure SE530. I also acquired at Christmas a pair of Audio Technica ATH-AD700 open back phones, many reviews and write-ups can be found about these on the net, suffice to say, they are pretty damn good. Although for me they were lacking the 'slam' in the bass that I was looking for. This may be expected in open back phones but it was just too lightweight and lacking in impact.

Anyway, I thought for a laugh I'd connect my AD700's to the Tg01, just to see how crap it would sound compared to a dedicated mp3 player. And considering it doesn’t even have a proper headphone socket I thought it may not even drive the phones at all.

WOW. Highly impressed! It's hard to describe but the instruments seem to have more space around them within the music, a bigger and better presentation. The Sony now sounds more confined, a smaller soundstage and more muffled in the lower bass. These differences are only subtle but its these subtleties that add up and give a better overall musical experience. And the bass slam with clarity that I was looking for, it's there! I did some A/B testing last night between the Sony and Tosh and the Tosh has better bass. Where the Sony has a slightly muffled quality to the smack of a drum, The Tosh has an immediate crack of an impact about it. This is even more apparent when listening with the PFE's. I tested this using the beginning few seconds of Paul Simons 'The Boy in the Bubble'. And all this through that poxy usb connector and a flat equaliser setting.

So, my plans now to upgrade to a Cowon S9 in search of audio nirvana have been shelved. The TG01 is my player of choice. It may be seen by some as a bastard child of a mongol, but I love it, and it loves me!

[Guest David Strange]

<snip>

The TG01 is my player of choice. It may be seen by some as a bastard child of a mongol, but I love it, and it loves me!

Indeed! When I got some decent earphones I was quite staggered by the quality the TG01 delivers. I never really thought MP3s could sound so good (although when I said this to my partner he replied, "The only people who think MP3s are low quality are people who have just spent a thousand pounds on a ludicrous CD player"). You might be interested in trying out Pocket Player; a far superior media player than WMP. Of course, compared to a simple MP3 player the TG01 can play videos, run games, surf the web, take pictures... oh and make phone calls :)

I also love my TG01 and as it serves me so well I'd guess it loves me too :)

Cheers,

David.

[Guest honolulu.]

I think nitrogen is the best player for the tg01, better eq than other player, easy control with touch screen, easy acces to the blank screen.

skinnable and free :)

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=523505

[Guest SteveYorks]

I've been using the bundled Core player for my listening, mainly because I use that for watching videos also, which it does perfectly. However the nitrogen player looks interesting, and I see there is plenty of choice for WVGA skins - I think I'll be checking it out :)

[Guest xdalover]

I agree with David Strange: OK, Nitrogen it's free, but doesn't have support for lyrics , crossfader...Pocket Player does...

[Guest David Strange]

I agree with David Strange: OK, Nitrogen it's free, but doesn't have support for lyrics , crossfader...Pocket Player does...

Perhaps I was being vacant, but I couldn't find a way of making a media library in Nitrogen. I found that you can browse folders, but when all your music is spilt up into sub-folders, there seems to be no clear way of playing all tracks from all sub-folders randomly. Pocket Player can be told where to search for music (which it does incredibly quickly), including sub-folders, which it adds to a library and you can then browse that library by artist, album, song name, etc. or just play the lot randomly.

Pocket Player also supports skinning, but I haven't fiddled with that much as I have simple needs for my music player interface. I have a vague memory that you have to set the skin to default_wvga.psz when you run it for the first time, to use the full WVGA resolution, but that is as far as I've gone with changing skins.

Cheers,

David.

[Guest SteveYorks]

Well the Nitrogen player is out for me, tried using it this morning but some tracks were crackling at high volume. I swapped back and forth between Core player and Nitrogen, using same volumes, songs etc, and it was just happening with the Nitrogen player, so I've removed it.

I'll look at Pocket Player next :)

[Guest justj]

TG01 is good (excellent even, if WOW HD is installed) as a mp3 player but with limited battery power it is just can't compete with dedicated mp3 player.

If you want a mp3 player with really outstanding sound, long battery life, sd expansion and DAB then Cowon's D2+ DAB is the one. The sound it produces is out of this world (use with Shuer 530 that is).

[Guest The Real Mc Coy]

With Mugen ML battery my TG01 lasts longer than my previous player (Archos 605 Wifi) either in MP3 or in video.

[Guest kevinpwhite]

Personally, I favour Pocket Music for audio and Core Player for video, through a pair of Westone 3 IEMs and, when practicable, using an RSA Predator portable amp via high quality silver / OFC interconnects with Neutrik connectors.

Having come to the TG01 from the now elderly Toshiba e830 which has an excellent DAC, I'm delighted to find that the audio quality is at least as good and I believe, in the round, significantly better and would fully echo SteveYorks sentiments in the first post.

Audio source quality is however one of if not the most significant factor here - so using 1:1 .wav files ripped direct from CD rather than one of the various compressed formats is preferred; it does obviously take up more storage space, but as a trade between number of CDs worth of music and quality, I think well worthwhile. The old e830 had a 32GB CF card plus assorted 4GB SDs, so really not a problem; with the next generation 32GB uSDs round the corner, that becomes less of an issue for the TG01 although I do find the physical location of the slot behind the battery unnecessarily restrictive.

The TG01 is taking a bit of sorting out from a connectivity point of view given the highly capable, but also limiting nature of the single micro USB port. However once we can either figure a way of being able to simultaneously charge and drive audio output or a 3rd party manufacturer releases a suitable Charger Accessory Adapter, then the current constraint of no 3.5mm jack can be overcome. There are several other posts touching on this aspect in the thread Headphone Amplified Sound Output.

Regards,

Kevin

Edited January 17, 2010 by kevinpwhite

[Guest xdalover]

Snapdragon chipset sound area was designed to exceed the present standards. That's a fact that explain the good sound quality.

The best Pocket PC player in the history was (is?) in my opinion the 40iplay. (Anybody know it?) . But doesn't work on TG01 properly (it's too old, what a pity...) And the next is the Conduits Pocket Player.

But even the best player can be improved (specially using earphones) with the SRS WOW.

This program was used for the first TG01 owners to "fix" the poor volume sound, but we forgot that this program is a piece of acoustic engineery and improves the sound quality to the greatest HI-FI levels

Poket Player+SRS WOW are the best way to enjoy listening to music on a Pocket PC device.

Best Regards

Edited January 17, 2010 by xdalover

[Guest kevinpwhite]

....... SRS WOW.

This program was used for the first TG01 owners to "fix" the poor volume sound, but we forgot that this program is a piece of acoustic engineery and improves the sound quality to the greatest HI-FI levels

Poket Player+SRS WOW are the best way to enjoy listening to music on a Pocket PC device.

Best Regards

I have tried to install SRS WOW to check out its potential but have been unable to install successfully on the TG01 with WM6.5. Can anyone advise if they have it working correctly or is there some difference between 6.1 (which many people are clearly using it with) ?

May be a software conflict so I was contemplating an HR to check out at some point.

Regards,

Kevin

[Guest xdalover]

I have tried to install SRS WOW to check out its potential but have been unable to install successfully on the TG01 with WM6.5. Can anyone advise if they have it working correctly or is there some difference between 6.1 (which many people are clearly using it with) ?

May be a software conflict so I was contemplating an HR to check out at some point.

Regards,

Kevin

Unfortunately the standard SRS WOW copies that you can find around internet doesn't work correctly in our device. Some time ago, someone discovered that a mix of three cabs together were the only way to enjoy SRS WOW in TG01. But the problem is that this mix it's also very unstable and conflictive with other soft present in your PDA, and sometimes some of its components are impossible to uninstall!!! So if you want to test it, my advice is first fully backup your present configuration, then install the cabs IN THE RIGHT ORDER! and that's all. Soft reset. Sometimes two or three soft resets are necessary.Test for a time (some days). If your device has an unexpected behaviour (resets, too slow, sleeping beauty), come back to your previous situation and forget SRS WOW for the moment.

I wonder if we can at last be accepted on Xdadevelopers someone would be able to find a new SRS WOW version without these ugly problems.

In my opinion sound quality improvement makes the test to be worthwhile (to your own risk, of course) :)

http://www.modaco.com/index.php?s=&sho...t&p=1052885

[Guest SteveYorks]

xdalover - Interesting to hear that the Snapdragon is designed for audio performance, where did you hear this, do you have any links?

kevinpwhite - nice to hear that someone else with good iem's can back up what I've already heard on the Tosh. I'm hoping others with various phones and DAP's (Cowon D2 perhaps?) can give their opinions on the sound quality too. Maybe the TG01 should be mentioned in Head-Fi, although I can see most people dismissing it out of hand of any possibility of been comparable with good dedicated dap's, especially given that it doesn't even have a headphone socket.

I've tried SRS WOW but it bricked my phone and I need a hard reset. I tried the v.3 cab and the three separate cabs, both had problems and then I lost sound so had to reset. It did seem that the sound was louder and altered to be wider, but I couldn't get to the SRS program to alter any settings, and it sounded crappy with too wide a sound.

I see many mentions of peoples favoured audio player, Pocket Player, Nitrogen etc., am I correct in thinking that all would produce the same sound quality, as they are all just front ends used to point to files?

[Guest keko1979]

with nitrogen i can´t put the volume keys for change the music and with coreplayer I can.can you put the volume keys for change the music in nitrogen?

With coreplayer i put the camera button for blank screen and with volume buttons I change the music,is perfect.

[Guest kevinpwhite]

xdalover - Interesting to hear that the Snapdragon is designed for audio performance, where did you hear this, do you have any links?

kevinpwhite - nice to hear that someone else with good iem's can back up what I've already heard on the Tosh. I'm hoping others with various phones and DAP's (Cowon D2 perhaps?) can give their opinions on the sound quality too. Maybe the TG01 should be mentioned in Head-Fi, although I can see most people dismissing it out of hand of any possibility of been comparable with good dedicated dap's, especially given that it doesn't even have a headphone socket.

Hmm - yes I have thought about adding some comments on Head Fi but suspect you are probably right that may not quite meet some expectations ! Maybe we should start a new theme anyway..... :)

I've tried SRS WOW but it bricked my phone and I need a hard reset. I tried the v.3 cab and the three separate cabs, both had problems and then I lost sound so had to reset. It did seem that the sound was louder and altered to be wider, but I couldn't get to the SRS program to alter any settings, and it sounded crappy with too wide a sound.

I've tried the same route also with pretty much the same results. From having trawled the web on the subject it appears that SRS seemed to loose interest in this avenue some while ago and consequently I suspect that it is highly unlikely that there will be a stable variant available. In the meantime, I'm happy enough to strive for as close to accurate and natural reproduction of the .wav files I can rip from CD using Exact Audio Copy / Accurate Rip via a Plextor Plexwriter Premium2. Properly configured, this combination should be giving 100% bit-accurate audio copies.

I see many mentions of peoples favoured audio player, Pocket Player, Nitrogen etc., am I correct in thinking that all would produce the same sound quality, as they are all just front ends used to point to files?

Yes you are pretty much on the nose - all these WinMo apps are basically a GUI front end to the native DAC hardware functionality (for .wav reproduction) or in the case of recognised compression formats, using either native or in some cases specific bundled codecs. As an example, in the About screen for Pocket Music it quotes:

"... This software is using Microsoft Windows Media Player Control for Pocket Internet Explorer for decoding MP3 and WMA files. MPEG Layer-3 audio compression technology is pateneted by Thompson Multimedia and Fraunhofer IIS. "

So is largely visual / ease of use rather than audio effect. I'd say that given the quality of the onboard DAC is whatever it is for your particular device, then the 3 other variables - source file quality, interconnect (incl. amp if used) and earphones are probably of roughly equal significance in perceived end listening fidelity. Therefore makes sense to try and get each element in that chain to a similar level of performance. :)

Regards,

Kevin

[Guest SteveYorks]

Thanks for the info kevin.

Further to the preferred audio players that people use I stumbled across S2P (slide to play), freeware from the same guy who made S2U2.

This is the best player I've come across that fits my needs. It's a very 'Applesque' looking thing with great touch control and animation, swiping from 1 album cover to the next, and songs/albums presented in proper finger friendly lists instead of tiny text and folder views. Oh, and it even has reflections under the album covers :-)

It still has a couple of small faults at the moment (version S2P v0.73 beta), but if you go back to a previous version you get the full 'coverflow carousel'. (which was removed from the latest version due to instability, however I haven't tried it with the Tosh so don't know if this older version would be an issue for us).

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=556885

[Guest SteveYorks]