Does FM consume more energy then mp3?

[fedetxft10]

Does anyone know if listening to FM consumes more energy than listening to MP3. I'm suspecting it does, but I wanted to know if everyone has that impression.

I have a t10 which sais it can play 53 hours of mp3 at 128 kbps.

[BlaqReaper]

I always thought listening to FM consumes less energy, but I'm not too sure.

[Voice of Reason]

I'd say FM would consume less power than accessing the flash drive...tho I'd be interested to see an empirical test ;P

[BlaqReaper]

Originally Posted by Voice of Reason

I'd say FM would consume less power than accessing the flash drive...tho I'd be interested to see an empirical test ;P

^That's my reasoning, but I'm not sure if it takes much batteries to access a flash drive. I know it takes more batteries to access the a hard drive player, but I can only guess for flash drives. However, I don't see what how it couldwaste a lot of batteries for using fm.

[savagenator]

i would think FM takes more power than standard playback becuase it has an FM chip that takes in the signal, decodes it, and then plays it, where as the normal playback would just take from the flash drive without much processing.

[LAB DESIGN]

I'm guessing that there will not be much difference between the 2.



LD

[Lord Julius]

Originally Posted by savagenator

normal playback would just take from the flash drive without much processing.

Without much processing? Let me give you the binary printout of an mp3
file, pencil and paper, and then you play it Decoding compressed formats
takes a hell of a lot of processing power. And processors use energy, a P4
3GHz uses about 90 Watts under load! (a 19" monitor 30-50 W, a hard disk
about 2.5 W,) This is a desktop, but just to stop the myth that it's the lcd
and the mechanical parts that eat power.
A few estimated numbers for the T10, based on specs of similar components
(I don't have the chip specs for the T10)
- FM tuner 0.05 W
- screen 0.05 - 0.3 W, (latest mobile technology - older LCD)
- processor: hard to say. Coldfire, as used in the H3xx, is about 1W, so the
T10 will have something smaller. But very likely more than the tuner, with
the demanding task of decoding mp3 or ogg files.

[Sesquash]

Originally Posted by fedetxft10

Does anyone know if listening to FM consumes more energy than listening to MP3. I'm suspecting it does, but I wanted to know if everyone has that impression.

I have a t10 which sais it can play 53 hours of mp3 at 128 kbps.

Hello,

FM is passive. The signal only has to be intercepted, then the stereo discriminator provides left and right channel information. This does not need parsing (computing equations) and therefore takes a minimal amount of power to achieve.

As stated by another poster to this thread, COMPRESSED formats need deciphering.

The T10 is quite an amazing piece of technology. Basically, you have a full and dedicated COMPUTER SYSTEM comprising of the CPU, the sound card (chip), the screen monitor, the DAP chip (digital to analog) and of course an FM front-end circuit. To think that they have created a full fledged computer system that has a form factor that weighs nothing, has been successfully miniaturised, has incredible audio processing capabilities, kinda makes the eyes water...

Just think of what this miniaturised full computer music system would have cost to own, perhaps 10 years ago. I dare say, that the average consumer would not have been able to afford it at that time!!! I know that I would not have, lol.

Back to the subject---using the FM will draw negligible power and will give you the maximum usage time if only used exclusively per fresh battery to exhaustion.

Cheers!

Sesquash

[fedetxft10]

I now know what drains the battery more than anything else: deleting and uploading files from the PC. I had 1 line left in the indicator and it died quickly. I have a USB 1.1 interface so it takes a while to upload all the files.