BIOS: Technology Means Business

With the MP3 players of today seeming to have an endless list of features, you do start to wonder if sound quality is being overlooked a little.

After all, what's the point of having an all singing, all dancing MP3 player, if it doesn't sound much better than your old cassette player?

Enter the latest player from IOPS. With a feature list alone that seems impossible to fit into such a tiny metal shell – you’d expect the manufacturer to have cut a few corners.

Fortunately, they haven’t, and what we have here is one of the most beautifully constructed, funkiest looking little players around.

Although it seems to be lacking a model number, you do get support for MP3s and WMAs, as well as the popular OGG format that everyone seems to be in love with these days.

Power is adequate with an audio frequency output of 20mW + 20mW, with juice coming from a Lithium-ion battery. The 65K colour OLED display isn’t anything special, though it is nice to hear that the player (whatever it’s called) comes loaded with SRS 2.0 sound enhancement.

Although SRS Labs has developed a whole range of audio technologies for different applications, the SRS (Sound Retrieval System) 3D stereo system used in the IOPS player is designed to retrieve and restore the spatial information that is lost during ordinary audio compression of any stereo recording and restores the original three-dimensional sound field.

As a result, the reproduced sound should be much closer to what the artist originally intended, including accurate positioning of instruments and vocals.

[Best MP3 Player Pricing UK]
[Best MP3 Player Pricing US]