[9000DC9000]

Okay, I wanted to get an Ipod so bad as to replace my old and rather unfashionable h140 which is not as sleek and 'now' so much so that I started on a quest to find all the cons on my h140. What I found - its chunky - thus lacks sleekness and style, it has no video capabilities or colour screen, the clickwheel on the ipod shits on the iriver's joystick, less capacity than the new 80gb ipod, etc etc etc, and lastly its crap (not an entirely justifiable con, but anyways helped me in the moment to try and convince myself 'i hate iriver'). Now, I tryed vmoda vibes with both devices. Ipod sounds damn good I thought when i first listened to the ipod thru the vibes. Then i listened to the iriver h140, turned the bass up a fraction and WOW (not the preset), this was even better, the sound had more depth, more atmosphere etc. So, i thought 'so what?' and attempted to recreate the sound thru the ipod by applying the inbuilt eq settings. All good until I came to the conclusion that the output of an ipod is NOT capable of handling bass. I tryed the extra bass setting on ipod, not much added bass tbh. Then I tryed the 'deep' setting. In doing so i found a more penetrating drone of a bass but accompanied by a heap of distortion - now this was a problem with the ipod, not earphones as when i tried the vibes with the h140 using rockbox at the ridiculous highest bass level (tryed Dead Prez's - 'hip hop'), there was no distortion whatsoever at the maximum volume (don't do this you will go deaf in the long term and get a serious headache in 2 mins like i did). Anyhow, the bass on the iriver is amazing, and not just for hiphop. Any genre whatsoever from classical to rock sounded amazing and you can hear echos in the background from the deep, rich bass the iriver and vibe combo provides. In my opinion, if you have vibes and an iriver, do not waste money on an ipod coz you will lose half the experience such a decent pair of earphones such as the vibe has to offer. If you absolutely hate bass and it gives you a headache, get an ipod, guarantees no headache, if you want the option of no bass on an iriver, just turn the bass down on rockbox or set eq to SRS or somethin and turn the volume down - Sorted! now go get on with some work. But if you want the OPTION of having deep, involving (headshaking if preferred) bass and atmosphere to bring your music to life, its all about getting a h140 ( plus you get amazing digital audio recording capabilities + fm tuner) So much as I hate to say it, screw apple, and as for iriver - get on the job of making a hdd player with
120+gb capacity, same great recording features of the h140, a video player,more media playback formats, bluetooth, wifi, 30+ hours battery life, more style than the 80gb ipod, less size than the 80gb ipod ( ie make a thin clix-design hdd player with proper touchscreen buttons and hold-to-scroll feature). Do this iriver and your fans will love you for it and buy 10 units each guaranteed!