iRiver iFP-180T Review

Overall Rating

Great sound quality.

Menu system can be counter-intuitive at times.

First of all, let me tell you that in the past I've always regarded MP3 as being vastly inferior in terms of sound quality, compared to the likes of Minidisc. I'm really fussy when it comes to what I listen to my music on. I remember dabbling a few years ago with various ripping software and being totally unimpressed with MP3. I recently saw that Richer Sounds were selling portable MP3's - I guessed the technology had moved on, and decided to investigate further

After reading a lot of reviews, I settled on the iRiver 180T, because of good feedback on sound quality. Also, it takes a single AA battery, which although bigger than the now usual AAA, means that playtime is longer. I'm dubious about the claimed 20hr battery life - I think you'd have to turn the LCD backlight off completely to achieve this. But decent runtimes can be achieved with a Duracell or NiMH rechargeable.

Some other reviews say that the menu system is difficult to use. It's not exactly intuitive at first - don't expect to use the player without reading the manual. But once you're used to the buttons, it's no more difficult than using your mobile phone. A little patience is well rewarded, because the 180 offers so many options. Download the latest firmware (v3.06 at time of writing), and you get a new graphic equalizer to play with, an impressive 3D sound feature, plus a host of other new features to tweak and peak the player with.

The PC software is pretty basic - in fact it's annoying that you have to use it at all. It offers nothing over windows explorer, and you can't upload MP3's from the player to your PC. One nice feature is the ability to set the names and frequencies of the radio stations, then download them to the 20 presets on the player. You'll need a separate ripper to get you music from CD to MP3. I downloaded NeoAudio from the Always Freeware site, and it does the job perfectly. Set the bitrate to 128kbps and the sound quality will be more than acceptable. At this rate you can get around 30 songs in the 128MB memory, around 2hrs worth. You can always use lower rates and store more, but then the sound starts to resemble MW radio, or worse, a phone line.

The hardware itself looks cool - fairly light but well screwed together. I didn't even try the headphones that came with it. I use a pair of Sony MDR-W08's which you get for about a tenner at Richer Sounds.

I was mainly interested in MP3 playback, so the voice recorder and tuner are more of a bonus to me. The voice recorder is perfectly adequate for the job intended, although don't expect to be bootlegging any concerts with it. The tuner sounds OK when you can get decent reception - although it doesn't seem to pick up stations as well as my cheapo radio from the pound shop!

Overall, I'm very impressed with the unit. The sound quality really is excellent, well beyond my expectations. Yes, it's still probably not as good as MD, but you'd have to compare them both side by side to notice the difference. If you can stretch to it, get a bigger memory size - you will not be disappointed. I can't wait until the memory gets cheaper and the players get smaller - I'll definitely look at another iRiver when that time arises.