Customer Reviews

Entempo Spirit 20 GB MP3 Player

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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 (support@entempo.com), so I tried contacting Randy Kemps (randy@entempo.com) 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.

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.

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.

First of all let me express my thanks to Entempo for making an inexpensive hdd mp3 player. It's a good piece of equipment for the price.

However, I would like to list my gripes with it:

The 4 band headphone jack is a rediculous feature which, at least in my opinion should have been left out. Basically what it allows for you to do is to record audio using the in-line microphone on the packaged earbuds. This in itself was unecessary because there is a microphone built into the player. Also it means that, if you would like to use a set of headphones other than the provided earbuds the jack will eventually degenerate and become unuseable.

Second, the crashes are too frequent for my tastes. Not sure why it happens half the time as well it seems that certain songs just make it crash constantly. Also sorting playlists on the player itself is a hassle, though entempo is providing free software on their website which allows you to do this on your computer in about half the time. I didn't want to bother taking all that time so I just organized every song into managable genres which I found to be much easier.

Overall it is a nice little player and definately well worth the money especially as though it's going for a mere $100 right now. Now if it were the same price as any of its rivals then it wouldn't be worth the money; but at $200 cheaper than the closest contender, it's a steal.

Ok, here is the bottom line:

I think that the price is unbeatable. Lots of storage for about $100.00, and easy to transfer lots of music though the USB cable. Now, the downside is those freakin' headphones. The fact that you cannot fully insert the jack from any headset into the player, not even the ones' that come with Spirit 20, is a shame. I can be listening to music, and if I am not careful, the sound can suddenly cut in and out without any reason at all. At that point, I have to make sure that the headphone jack is not all the way into its socket on the player, nor too far out, but just right. It is frustrating, to say the least. I gave up on the earphones supplied, and went to Best Buy and bought a $20.00 set that hooks over my ears and they sound great. You still have to play with the jack so it is not inserted too far in nor out, but at least it is workable.

Second, tech support blows. They operate on Pacific time, which is cool if you are on the West coast of the US. But even then, getting somebody to call you back is an exercise in frustration. I had to refer to their poorly designed website, and figure out that my player kept locking up because the headset I was using could be conflicting with the device itself, and because I needed to upgrade the firmware. Now, I have been in IT support for a multitude of years, so after some research I finally figured what the solution could be, but the average person might feel totally lost and have to wait until somebody from Tech calls them back for assistance. This is not acceptable.

The player itself is not attractive at all, but for $100.00 I can forgive quite a bit. Entempo just needs to make it possible to plug any headset you want into the player, and they will have a solid, rather chunky, and cheap MP3 player. If you want to compare it to a car, think of this as the Korean alternative, especially the early Korean automakers, to a fine Japanese car. Lots of bang for a not very sophisticated product.

For Christmas '04, I decided to get myself what I had been wanting to get for a while: an MP3 player. I surfed the net and looked at all the different types. Unfortunately, most every product of any company had the same problem: they were pretty expensive. So, I was naturally excited when I found the Spirit for $165. It seemed like a decent piece of machinery, so I bought it.

The first couple weeks with it were pretty good. The Spirit worked perfectly well in terms of playing music. Unfortunately, getting the music onto the player wasn't easy. A friend of mine had heard that I was getting an MP3 player, so he bought me $50 worth of songs on iTunes. We were both new to MP3 players, so we didn't realize that it only worked for iPods. I ended up having to get songs from my CD's to my computer and THEN onto my Spirit. As for the downloading, I did manage to get a few songs off of iTunes, but it took a long time to convert them to the proper file for the Spirit.

But once I actually got the music on, it was pretty smooth sailing. It locked up a number of times, but I didn't mind that much. Poking a needle in the reset button didn't bother me, although it did happen a fair amount.

The features for it are pretty good, although I don't use them that much. I mainly got it for the music. It has some handy music features, like scramble and repeat, and a few settings for changing the music bass and such. These features are handy, but I don't use them that much. Then again, I'm not much of a techno geek when it comes to these things. Like I said, I got it for the music.

So after Christmas, I felt happy with the Spirit. It played my music fine and I enjoyed it. However, it became a problem when school started again. I wanted to bring it to school so I could listen to it after class, but the size got in the way. The only pockets I had that could even hold it well were my big coat pockets, and that didn't work very well. The cloth case it comes with has a belt strap, but I myself prefer to not wear a belt. So I ended up not being able to take it to school. Let's face it, this is not a small player.

At this point, I wondered if I should have maybe rethought what kind of MP3 player to get. Sure, the Spirit works fine and is cheap, but it isn't something you can easily take with you somewhere. It might have been my perfectionism kicking in, but I decided to get an iPod mini instead. Sure, it only has 4GB while the Spirit has 20GB, but I think that once you get up to even just 2GB's worth of music, you're probably not listening to EVERY one of them.

In conclusion, if you want an inexpensive MP3 player and you don't mind a pretty dang chunky size and something that locks up some, the Spirit is for you. If not, try something else.

I bought this from TigerDirect, filled it with music, waited forever for it to index, only to have it suffer multiple HD crashes within a day of normal use. I got it to come back to life a few times, until finally it stayed dead. I think the problem with this is that it's a hard drive (moving parts) and cannot withstand even the slightest movement. I was really disappointed.

Well I dont like this product, it was very big and can not carry no where so please do not buy this item.

Temour Sayed

Got this for $105.00 off ebay, and its true to all the reviews i have read this is not an ipod or a creative zen extra. The menu is somewhat in general between the ipod and the zen's menu style. For the price it holds tons of music. This is the biggest problem that is not mentioned!! Once your in the middle of a song you cant change song without stopping the one you are listeing to this is very inconvient if you like to skip around songs but for me it doesn't matter b/c i listen to album from beginning to end. This player is one of the first tries at a reasonably priced mp3 player.
This player will fill up your pocket. Dont expect to just whip it out of your jeans pocket. Its amazing capicity is great for moving files and is much cheaper than buying a removable hard drive. People who dont like to be chained to music programs will like this guy. Sadly I have found it indexes incorrectly sometimes listing album tracks from a-z rather than 1-10. It wont work with I TUNES! thats one of the biggies u might not like about it. Other reviews will most likly say its delicate and it will fry if you shake it or it will fry if you hook it up to a power supply and then try to put songs on it. None of this is true my has worked like a charm, battery like is amazing. If you drain the battery completely (this happened to me once b/c the charger adapter fell off my wall outlet) it might say it had a hard drive failure. NO SUCH THING just plug it in,charge it up and it will be ready to fight another day. Thats about all other than that the record function sucks but and its really really easy to accidently press the button its a good machine.

So if you can stand a few defects with the design this mp3 player will save you 200-400 dollars depending on what you compare it to thats also 20 gig. Hope this helps some..

Bought this couple of months back but never able to play any songs so far.

It gets hang, everytime I start playing the songs and the reset will index all the songs again.

I dont recommend anyone buying this though the price is less.