Microsoft Zune 120GB

I have burned through dozens of Mp3 players. Mainly because I fill them up too fast and I end up having to get bigger ones. So the day finally came where the thought crossed my mind that I don’t want to keep spending my damn money on a new music player every 4 months, so I’m just going to get the biggest one I can find. So after naturally avoiding the Ipod, I went and got the (at the time) new 120GB Microsoft Zune. I had owned the 8GB Zune previous to my purchase of the big klunky Zune 120, so I was already pretty familiar to the software and user-interface. So knowing Microsoft’s experience and skill in the sound quality area, I was expecting good sound output. I will tell you this, I got my first Zune 4 years ago and I’ve had one ever since.

I’m going to start with the positives. Everything is huge! The size of the screen makes room for a bigger font size so I don’t have to strain my eyes while flipping through the bands list, the album covers can display in high detail for ultimate enjoyment, and it works perfectly as a mini widescreen TV screen for video watching. Even though it takes an hour or so to figure it out at first, navigating around the device is a breeze. One of my favorite things about the Zune that can’t be done on any other Mp3 player that I know of is that you can set a background. It’s actually pretty neat how you can put a picture on your Zune and then set it as the background.

The sound quality is amazing, but the thing that I noticed is that there’s no equalizer! You can’t add in that extra bass boost when needed; you can’t cut back on the treble when you’re listening to some older stuff. Even when I hook up some really nice headphones to it, I still don’t get as much of a bass kick as I have with other devices. I would imagine that since there’s an extremely detailed and customizable equalizer in Windows Media Player, that there would be one on a Microsoft Mp3 device.

It seems that all of the Zunes I’ve had except for my current one have been part of batches with factory defects. I mean come one guys, one or two bad batches is understandable, but when you’ve got dozens of bad batches that are being put on the shelves and sold and when you finally discover that tons of people are having the same problem and you don’t do a recall?? I mean they knew about all of these bad batches, but they didn’t say anything about them! And all of the customers (me included) had to send ours in and wait for almost TWO MONTHS to get our replacement back, only for a few of us (me included) to find out that the replacement we got was defective too!! That’s the one thing that has pissed me off. But without all of the bugs (which only a few of them have), they last a lifetime and satisfy you to the fullest extent.