Diamond Rio Volt SP100

It's a very nice player, and it's easy to see why it's considered by many to be a standard in the field. I can't say enough about the Navigation. It uses a D-pad to navigate between directories (yes, it handles directories well). It's so very intuitive that you can easily do without the manual for general use. Pity that the equivalent Dpad on the remote isn't nearly as good. It's meant to behave the same as the big one on the main unit, but it's so small and touchy that you often find yourself making the wrong selections, or worse, making selections just by jarring the remote. The player might have skip protection, but the remote doesn't.

Excellent navigation with just two caveats. Here's the second: It doesn't handle long file names as well as it could. It sometimes will play long named files just fine, other times, it plays them as blank files of the appropriate length (4 minutes of white noise). FYI before you burn your MP3 CDs.

The sound quality is excellent, with equivalent or sometimes better sound quality compared to playing on a computer. The built-in graphical equalizer with presets improves (or degrades) the sound as you prefer.

The Display is larger than most and displays ID3 information. The only thing I don't like about it is that the third line is used up displaying some stupid dancing stick figures instead of something useful.

Only other biggy I should mention is that the case is pretty bad. It's tight for the player, making it hard to insert and remove. Once in, there's a hole in the side to let you plug in the cables. The bad design part of it is that other than that hole, and the velcro top to insert the player, there are no other openings. As such, you'll won't be able to see or make use of the screen or the main D-pad when it's in the case. This forces you to use the imprecise remote and to guess the navigation when it's in the case.

Good, but there are a few odd design decisions.