Personal Jukebox PJB-100 MP3 40GB
Player
 Yeah, yeah, I know what all you hardcore
audiophiles are thinking: MP3? Is he kidding?
Well, no, I'm not -- nor am I turning my back on
high-resolution hi-fi reproduction either. The PJB-100 ain't your ordinary MP3 player.
That said, even if it was just another low-to-mid-fi portable, it would still offer enough
flexibility to excite me -- and probably a great many other audiophiles as well.
These days MP3 is a fightin' word. It provokes the record
industry with visions of pirates busily downloading (stealing!) valuable
intellectual property, while it offends audiophiles with its reputation for lossy
compression.
What the record industry has lost sight of is that many of
us already own tons of digital music and aren't interested in stealing any -- we're
just looking for ways to effectively manage the music we've got. And it doesn't hurt a bit
if I can also take that music with me in a form that doesn't put my beloved archival
copies of it at risk.
Last year when my wife and I first started going to the
gym, I also discovered another reason for portable access to my music:
self-defense. I like the folks at my gym, but I don't even remotely share their taste in
music. So, being a gadget-loving American male, I bought a solid-state MP3 player (with a
whopping 128MB capacity) and immediately discovered the inherent balancing act confronting
quality-conscious MP3 listeners: High-resolution audio is possible if you're
willing to trade bandwidth for duration. Encoding music at 128kbps gets you about an
hour's worth of music that sounds unsatisfactorily gritty and harsh, whereas encoding at,
say, 320kbps gives you great sound, but only a few minutes of it.
I found myself considering a complete computer platform
change, simply so I could get an iPod. I mentioned this to HeadRoom's Tyll Hertsens and he
hastened to assure me that: 1) I could use an iPod with my PC (there's a whole underground
of PC users trading tips on the web, if you're interested) and 2) there was a
better-sounding choice.
To say I was intrigued is an understatement.
My poor fellow, why not carry a watch? -- Beerbom
Tree to a passerby carrying a grandfather clock
Tyll referred me to www.mp3factorydirect.com, which
markets the PJB-100, a portable MP3 player built around the Motorola 56309 DSP chip, a
10-minute 12MB DRAM buffer, and a 2.5" laptop computer hard-disk drive. The unit's
price is based on its hard-drive capacity: the 6.5GB model runs $329, while the 40GB (!)
version on review here will set you back $579 ($849 "list" -- whatever that
means). Models with 20GB and 30GB drives are also available. At 128kbps, 40GB is capable
of storing over 650 hours of music (but who cares?); even at 320kbps, it'll store a few
hundred CDs.
The PJB-100 started out as a Compaq corporate research
project -- a joint effort between Compaq's Systems Research Center (SRC) and the Palo Alto
Advanced Development group (PAAD), actually -- but it was licensed to Korean manufacturer
HanGo, and is marketed in the US by Remote Solutions through a variety of websites,
including www.mp3factorydirect.com,
www.musiccompressor.com, and www.thinkgeek.com. The PJB-100's heart
is its 2.5" hard drive. It sports a rechargeable Lithium ion battery, which can play
10 to 11 hours on a single charge. The player resembles a first-generation Walkman in size
and weight, at 6" by 3.25" by 1" and 9.5 ounces.
That's kind of big as MP3 players go, but the PJB-100 is
not so much a conventional MP3 player as it is a powerful special-purpose music computer.
It contains the 56309 DSP chip, that signature hard drive (of course), 12MB DRAM, 1MB of
flash memory, a fairly high-quality digital-to-analog converter, and a 2.75" by
1.5" LCD display. It employs Fraunhofer
IIS MPEG-2 layer-3 encoding technology (MP3) to store compressed digital audio on the
hard drive. The PJB-100 uses flash ROM and a general-purpose DSP, making it a simple
matter to upgrade it to use other compression algorithms (WMA anyone?) or to mix-and-match
different MP3 algorithms for different tracks.
The PJB-100 comes packaged with a music management program
called Jukebox Manager, which is available for PC, Mac, or Linux users. Jukebox Manager
allows you to rip files from your own CDs and digital sources, transfer MP3s you already
have resident on your computer, and then manage the data on the PJB -- recording at
various bit rates, adding, deleting, copying, renaming, or moving tracks, discs, or sets.
Jukebox Manager connects to the Gracenote CDDB Music
Recognition Service and -- most of the time -- automatically labels your music. By and
large, this operates without any problem. Even really obscure discs seem to be recognized
(and trust me, I have lots of those). But even when the CDDB is no help, re-tagging files
is a piece of cake. Most of the time, the CDDB will identify a genre (called
"set" by Jukebox Manager), label a disc, and name the songs.
Jukebox Manager streams the data directly to the PJB from
your computer's CD drive, ripping the MP3 on the fly (meaning MP3 files don't remain on
your computer). If you already have MP3 files stored on your computer, you can transfer
them to the PJB -- although the transfer is a strict 1:1 and thus may not match the sound
quality of a CD you rip yourself at 192kbps or 320kbps.
The computer-to-PJB connection is by way of the (supplied)
USB cable. Speaking of supplied accessories, you also get a protective carrying case, a
universal AC adapter/battery charger, a pair of Koss Porta Pro folding headphones (better
than most gimme headphones, but nothing to write home about, in my opinion), and a
stereo-mini-to-two-RCA umbilical.
Let a scholar all Earth's volumes carry, he will but be
a walking dictionary
The trick to getting the best performance and most
flexibility out of the PJB-100 lies in mastering the Jukebox Manager software. First, and
most obvious, you need to pay attention to how you rip your MP3s. That's up to you, of
course, but I personally find 128kbps and below (96kbps and 64kbps) unsatisfactory. Some
people seem quite happy with 192kbps and 256kbps -- and they're a lot better than
128 -- but I've been using 320kbps, which I find all but indistinguishable from the
original files. Sound quality is a direct trade-off for capacity, but life is too short to
listen to crappy sound, don't you think?
The other trick is in the way you organize your sets,
discs, and songs when using the Jukebox Manager software. Set is the big category -- you
could arrange your material as rock, jazz, and classical for
instance. Within the broad category of rock the music is divided as discs, which
consist of their component songs.
The PJB-100 offers several playback options, including everything,
this set, this disc, and this track, which can be played
sequentially, repeated, or shuffled. You can even copy songs or discs and include them in
different sets. You can’t compose custom playlists as you can with some players, but
if you are reasonably imaginative in the way you label sets and discs in the Jukebox
Manager, you won't miss that capability.
The trick is setting up the broad set category so
that using the random shuffle feature creates thematically coherent programs. The
great thing about this is that you get to choose. I have a couple of mega-sets,
where I've ripped the entire recorded output of groups I particularly like, such as the
Penguin Café Orchestra or Buddy Miller or Miles Davis and I have more imaginative sets,
such as one I call Fun Rock which includes over 20 discs by Little Feat, the
Blasters, the Meters, Mickey Jupp, and other long-time favorites. Another favorite set is
one I dubbed Dreamscape, which consists of really quiet works by Bill Frissell, Jon
Hassell, Fripp & Eno, Stephan Micus, and Metheny & Haden. Some folks might even
find that one boring, but I find it the perfect snoozing-on-the-airplane
soundtrack. And that's the beauty part -- you're in control.
By the way, one salient operational detail is that the
PJB-100's 12MB DRAM allows it to store about 10 minutes of music in its buffer, so the
disc drive isn't always buzzing and spinning -- which means the 100 is not only quiet in
operation, but easy on its batteries.
Do I carry the moon in my pocket?
The big trick, as I've already said, is in setting up the
data in the first place. Actually using the PJB-100 is a piece of cake. It only has
six buttons, a volume control, and a control lock (very considerate -- it means you won't
accidentally run the battery down by inadvertently running the unit in your pack or
handbag).
The buttons are arrayed under and to the side of the LED
display. To the display's left are two ("up" and "down") that allow
you to scroll through set, disc, play options, and EQ. Below
the display are two sets of two buttons: play/pause and stop; and a pair
that allow you to scroll through each function's menu of options.
The volume control is optically coupled to its output, by
the way, so at its highest output the headphone jack outputs a line-level signal.
Lately, I've taken to toting the PJB-100 everywhere I go.
The ability to carry a few hundred discs' worth of music in a 10-ounce package is not to
be sneered at. I even bought a second AC adapter so I could park the unit in my main hi-fi
system when I wanted. I won't pretend the PJB-100 is the equal of my Musical Fidelity
Nu-Vista 3D CD player (not much is), but it sounds about the same as, say, my Sony
CDP-CX400 carousel CD changer. And, like the Sony, it's perfect for amusing me when I want
more than a disc's worth of music while I'm doing something else -- putting in my daily
slog on the recumbent bike, for instance.
I alluded to the fact that I consider MP3 at 320kbps
"all but indistinguishable" from CD quality, so you may be wondering what that
means. I'm still trying to sort it out, to tell you the truth. CD and 320kbps MP3 are
mighty close, but I seem to be able to hear certain types of low-level detail -- fret
noise, background noises, non-musical information, mostly -- with greater clarity through
the PJB-100 at 320kbps than with the CD source of the same material.
It's counter-intuitive, I know, but I take this as a sign
of information loss or some kind of Fraunhoffer EQ artifact. What? I hear you
saying, You're hearing stuff better and that's a sign of information loss? Exactly.
Let's face it, ripping the data to MP3 can't possibly create a copy with greater detail
than the original, so any differences must be attributable to losses somewhere in the
chain.
Is it a big deal? Nope, absolutely not. It's less
noticeable than the differences among many CD players and far less apparent than, say, the
difference between ripping at 256kbps and 320kbps. Many listeners either won't notice it
or just flat-out won't care. I tend to fall into the latter category, myself.
When it comes to using the unit as a portable device -- or,
in other words, using it the way it was probably designed to be used -- the PJB-100 is great.
It's a tad big and a tad heavy for jogging with, but its handy belt clip securely fastens
it to your, um, belt, and for walking around or, say, traveling on an airplane or train,
it can't be beat. I've never had it skip, hang up, or stutter in day-to-day use.
However, you probably won't get everything it has to offer
unless you get some mighty fine headsets and those, in turn, will probably dictate some
form of headphone amplifier, if you want to listen at at-home volume levels with
high-impedance headphones.
On our recent trip to the UK, my wife and I used a signal
splitter and his'n'her sets of HeadRoom AirHeads feeding my Etymotic ER4Ses and her ER6es.
Together with the PJB-100, the HeadRoom/Etymotic combination made for just about the
calmest, most comfortable, quickest-seeming transatlantic flight I've ever taken -- well,
that and a new paperback edition of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. My wife concurs
-- except for my making her listen to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, not
that even she is blaming the PJB-100 for that.
And still the wonder grew, that one small head could
carry all he knew
To date, the ultimate system for mating the organizational
power of a computer with my complete CD collection, while retaining the high-resolution
digital sound quality I demand, remains a combination of my laptop, the Nirvis Slink-e, a
brace of Sony carousel changers, and an upsampling DAC -- but that's complex, expensive,
bulky, noisy (at least my laptop is), and a bit of a kludge-y inconvenience. By
contrast, the PJB-100 is affordable, compact, easy-to-use, and darned close to as good.
I can't think of any compact portable -- whether CD player
or MP3 player -- that offers its mix of features and sound quality, and it is certainly
not embarrassed by comparisons to most CD players intended for the home.
Plus it's fun -- which has got to count for something. If
you need to transport a lot of music in the most convenient way possible, the PJB-100 is
hard to beat. Based on a scale of dollars expended to fun received, it's got to be the
deal of the century.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
PJB-100 40GB MP3 Player
Price: $579 USD
Warranty: One year parts and labor
Remote Solution
Hango Electronics, Inc.
590 W. Central Avenue
Suite E
Brea, CA 92821
Phone: (714) 674-5190
Fax: (714) 674-5199
E-mail: inquiry@remotesolution.com
Website: www.remotesolution.com
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