Entempo Spirit 20 GB MP3 Player

by Entempo

Product Details

Product Manual [251kb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 4.4 x 3.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B0006MQCWW
• Item model number: SPIRIT200001
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)

Product Description

SPIRIT 20GB, is a hard drived based, portable digital audio device. SPIRIT 20GB is unique in its class with many new and innovative features. Spirit20 has a capacity of 20 GB, which is over 300 CDs of music in compressed format. This also means over 300 hours of music or your favorite audio book in mp3 or wma format.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

107 of 109 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars For an inexpensive MP3 player, pretty nice, November 23, 2004

By 

Nat "Nat" (Maryland) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entempo Spirit 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

There has been a lot of buzz around the internet about the Entempo Spirit 20 MP3 player as the first sub $200 20GB player. I just got mine today. It is huge and clunky, but I think I love it. $139 at Computer Surplus.

I've never owned an MP3 player, so I am not a connessieur. I've played with iPods at the store, but never really used one. I've never seen a Creative Zen or any of the other players. They look sexy and well designed, but I didn't like the dependence on software or drivers to access the device. I've never had a media library program I have liked for more than a week, and the idea that I ought to lock myself into one and not be able to move around to different computers easily makes me ralph. And the fact that the vendors spend time preventing you from copying files back off of the player seems insane to me.

If you have been coveting your best friend's iPod or want "the look", go get an iPod cause you will hate the Spirit. The thing is big-- 4.25" x 3.25" x 1.1" and about 10 oz. according to our kitchen scale. If you are having trouble visualizing, we are talking just a little smaller than an old-style Sony Walkman cassette player. This thing isn't going to get lost in your pocket. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that there was a full 2.5" notebook hard drive in there.

The controls are a little goofy. The scrolling/selecting lever is a small switch on the side, and the whole thing is big enough that it is hard to hold it securely and operate the lever with a single hand. Maybe I would have the same problem with the Zen Xtra, and I'll get the knack of this later. There are random and repeat functions, but I haven't really used them.

There is a feature to record memos and play and record FM radio. There is one microphone in the headphones, and another on the unit. The voice recordings are pretty muffled. My use of the FM tuner indoors has been pretty unremarkable-- it probably has the same problems I've heard with most of the MP3 FM tuners out there, and lacks enough of an antennae to work well indoors. The recording from the radio might suit you if you wanted to record a talk show, but is too low fidelity for music.

Oh, and, of course, the ear buds are nothing special, and there is a tiny bit of audible chatter as the next track loads.

So what's to like? This thing seems solid. They talk about Shox technology in the literature, and this is the big mystery on all the message boards how this provides five times the protection to the hard disk. The drive is only active on an occasional basis, so I am guessing that Shox may be some sort of disk head parking/locking feature to keep them from slamming into the platters if you decide to drop the Spirit on the deck. Or maybe it is just the rubber coating along the edges and corners of the player-- Dell makes a big point of saying how a plastic blister on the bottom of their laptop cases does something extraordinary to protect the drive. It would be nice to have an adorable MP3 player, but not if it will break when I look at it cross-eyed.

The other thing is the USB Mass Storage Support and the way it handles indexing. It is beautiful to Plug-and-Play and have it come up as a fast drive without any drivers. Copy stuff on (music, data, whatever), copy stuff off, and there are no limits. It has a pretty standard mini-USB connector on the Spirit, so I don't have to carry around the cable-- my PDA and USB card reader use the same cable. When you unplug it, it starts indexing all of the music on the device. Ba-bing, you now have a catalog by artist, album, and track. Nice. You can also build play lists on the device, but I am not big on play lists.

I read an posting on the internet by a guy who plugged in the Spirit into AC power and the USB at the same time and says his blew up. The manual advises you to use AC power while loading data via USB because this drains the battery faster, so I went ahead and tried. No problem-- sorry that the guy had problems, but it works fine for me.

Follow up after a couple of weeks:
The Spirit 20 has its ups and downs, but in all I remain pretty happy. I am not sure that this is a great player for the technically intolerant-- I have had a number of lock ups, generally when the player is indexing the ID3 tags. Most often it is just a matter of sticking a pin in the Reset hole to reset and reindex the player. One time it locked up while in USB mode, and for that one I actually had to run down the battery before I could reset it.

Battery life seems good, but I haven't really pushed it that hard. I played it all day at the office once, and it was still over the halfway mark on the battery meter.

I had a little difficulty reaching support ([e-mail]), so I tried contacting Randy Kemps ([e-mail]) who is mentioned in some of the press releases on the product. He says that a firmware upgrade is due in early December, and another in January to provide MusicMagic on the Spirit. MusicMagic is supposed to be an automatic playlist generator. Hopefully some of the minor issues I have had will be cleared up by these.

UPDATED 1/3/2006

I had an enquiry about the review, so here is an update:

I wouldn't really recommend it as more than a short term solution-- and this isn't a player to get all excited about. I'm happy enough to have had it as a first player, because it helped me work out what I like and don't like in an MP3 player. Since I discovered I liked listening to audio books, not having bookmarks to keep my place was a liability. I discovered that I didn't care about radio or recording radio if I had sufficient tracks on the player. I discovered that I wasn't really looking for a portable hard disk to move data around, but that having a Mass Storage Compliant drive was nice if not essential-- I have always hated the idea of iPod's closed file system.

In the end, I have sent back the Spirit twice because the hard drive died-- the warranty terms were for something like two years, but the device is not at all durable. Of course, it was clear from the start that two years was an optimistic lifespan for the company, and I've heard that the web site is dead. The device was also exceptionally... quirky. I'm a techie professional, so I am pretty tolerant of idiosyncratic devices and don't have a lot of difficulty devising workarounds. However, I saw a lot of traffic on the Yahoo group for Entempo Spirit indicating profound frustration-- I believe it is mostly because the ID3 tags on people's MP3 files were in a mess.

Within about eight months of buying the Entempo, I had replaced it with a Rio Karma HD player, and a Rio Forge flash player (of course Rio is now in the tank, but I'm still very happy with the devices). My wife still uses the Spirit to listen to audio books occasionally, and she seems happy enough because her demands are light.

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An excellent player for the price, January 15, 2005

By 

B. Ligget "Geek" (Billings, MT United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Entempo Spirit 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

I've had my Spirit for about a month now. It's a very solid player. Larger than most other out there but it's got a great feature set. No drivers are required. Just plug it into any reasonably modern machine and it shows up as a hard drive. You can use it as the worlds bulkiest thumb drive for transfering any kind of files.

The firmware update on the web site reduces lock ups. The only time mine every has an issue is when I remove mp3s from it. Adding files, moving them around, listening to music, creating playlists; no problems.

It's has enough power to drive most portable headphones up to 80 ohms or so. It has some grounding issues. When plugged into it's wall adapter, the headphone ground does not match and a 60hz hum becomes very audible. Just don't plug it in while listening to music. I had no problems plugging it into power while transfering files however. Battery life is excellent. Plug it in while you sleep and you'll never run out of juice.

The hard drive is indeed a 2.5 inch laptop drive and should be extremely easy to upgrade to ridiculous size.

Playlists are very easy to create on the device and are stored in standard m3u format. Alas, the player uses 8.3 file names making it extremely difficult to create playlist on your computer or use the playlists created on the Spirit on your PC.

Shuffle and repeat work well. Some players on shuffle will end up repeating songs within the playlist. This one does not.

I have to large gripes.

1. The player only shows the song name it's playing. Acres of screen unused and it doesn't tell you the artist or album. I don't have a good solution for this.

2. When you turn it off, it forgets everything. What you were listening to, where you were at in the playlist, etc. My solution is just not to turn it off. With the HD spun down and the music paused it uses almost no power.

Overall, it's a great player for the money. Great for anybody who cares more about the music than how well they have accessorised their outfit.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth the money, March 12, 2005

By 

WA Yankee in TN (Tennessee) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Entempo Spirit 20 GB MP3 Player (Electronics)

This may not turn out to be your favorite digital media player ever, but it's hard not to like a 20 gb device that costs $130 (not here - try Surplus Computers), plays mp3 and WMA files, pulls in your stronger FM signals, works as a portable USB-powered hard drive for data files, and in a pinch, works as a voice recorder.
Its most outstanding feature: very long battery life. I let it run, playing mp3's in random mode, for 30 straight hours once. I rarely need to charge it.
You get used to its shortcomings, unless your standard is already at Ipod-levels.
Here are two such flaws:
There is a faint but discernible whirring noise when the hard drive spins up, which happens at the start of a song but (more annoyingly) about every 2.5 minutes, which means that a quiet passage in, say, a piano sonata will be marred slightly.
On the other hand, if you're listening to 3-5 minute pop songs, you won't notice any but the initial spin for each song.
So classical music or jazz fans may be wise not to purchase this as their primary bliss machine.
Also, it's big with its 2.5 inch drive, and the reverse of sleek. Navigation isn't easy -- scrolling through the artists list, e.g. -- but maybe a firmware upgrade will help this.
You can find lots of faults with this player, but the bottom line is that it holds 20 gb, sounds quite decent, runs 20 hours plus, and costs $130. Refined it ain't, but it works.