Digisette's Duo-MP3 portable MP3 player, designed also to be usable with conventional cassette players, comes close to being an excellent digital convergence product, but its limited memory capacity and high price really hurt its overall value. Although the MP3-Duo is shaped like a standard audiocassette tape, that doesn't mean it looks bad. The sleek bare aluminum housing with black accents is attractive and adds a measure of ruggedness to the device that plastic can't match. A compartment for the included rechargeable battery is on top, along with a small power switch. There's a headphone jack on the side for listening to the Duo-MP3 without a cassette player, plus a narrow port for the interface cable that links the device to your PC via the parallel port. An included CD-ROM contains software that let us easily send MP3 files from our computer to the Duo-MP3. A typical MP3 file is about 3 to 4 MB, and it took an average of 50 seconds for the parallel port interface to transmit that much data to the unit.
The controls located on the face of the Duo-MP3 are very disappointing. Two buttons are used to raise and lower the volume, another button is used to stop tracks, and a fourth button is used to play tracks. The play button can also be pressed while you are listening to a song to select one of four preset equalizer settings, although two of the presets made all of the music we listened to sound muddy. Selecting tracks requires the use of two hands, as they require holding down one of the volume buttons and pressing play. It's an annoying setup, and there is no LCD display on the front of the device to let you know which track is playing--an unforgivable omission on a portable MP3 player.
Fortunately the sound quality is good--as long as you are listening with a better set of headphones than the tinny-sounding earbuds Digisette supplies. Listening to high-quality MP3s in our car via the cassette player sounded virtually indistinguishable from listening to the same tracks on CD, although there was some hiss that is unavoidable where tape heads are involved. It is very easy to use the MP3-Duo in a cassette tape player. We just turned it on, popped it into our tape deck, and accessed tracks by pressing fast-forward and rewind on the cassette player. The included rechargeable battery pack will keep the unit powered for up to six hours.
Considering the high price of this player one would expect to get a lot of memory, but sadly this isn't the case. The built-in 32 MB holds little more than a half hour of audio, and upgrading (via a 32 MB or 64 MB MultiMediaCard) is expensive. For the money it is possible to get a much more full-featured portable MP3 player with an LCD display, extra memory, better controls, and a car kit with a cassette player adapter. --T. Byrl Baker
Pros:
- Works in any cassette player
- Small design
- Good sound quality--especially if you use better headphones or a good cassette player
Cons: - Paltry amount of memory, and upgrading is expensive
- Limited controls
- Slow file-transfer interface
