No, Pocket-Lint is not turning into the Sennheiser tribute site, the problem is that universal German rival Beyerdynamic has returned to the studio level of audio equipment, content to let Sennheiser carpet the portables market with the kind of spread that Beyer boasted in the 1990s - and at the same time, updating the looks and prices to make them attractive enough to serially replace without necessarily repairing broken sets.

We first discovered the HD201s in Ireland and Sennheiser has such a large range we thought they were being sold off and discontinued at EUR€30 (£20) - only to see that the “if” design trophy was awarded in its launch year (2005). The cable measures 3m and there’s no take-up spool so the 201s are best for home use - if you want proper portability but with flexibility, the existing HD202s also have a 3m cable and a tidy to wind round the lengths of lead you don’t want bulging out of your pocket.

Put on the phones, even when new and brittle-sounding, and you’ll understand why the set won an award - they can be worn for hours without getting tired or causing earache - though in the summer you may have to have the cloth ready to wipe off the sweat.

Once the HD201s have been “run in”, you’ll find the most open sound heard in a pair of closed-back cans in a long time, as if you had speakers right next to your ears, which is how voices will sound.

This review took longer than expected because I was looking for faults, some way to trip up these cans with many more CDs than our test set, and it was almost impossible - you can crank up the volume through an amplifier only to find the music distorting - but at that level the listener would probably go deaf long before fussing about the loss of sound quality.

We took the first major challenge of testing: the soundtrack to Batman Begins. From the start, this album features sampled effects and powerful kettledrum rolls, which give bookshelf speakers a pounding. The Sennheisers lapped up the percussion with ease, allowing the listener to hear the whole orchestra with none of the parts drowning out. Kettledrums are also the star of the 11-minute main theme from Master and Commander, and the HD201s’ soundstage makes you feel like the drummers are in the room right next to you.

The string section is also crisp and sharp although since they are twice the price, the PC150 headset range manages some more subtlety where the tracks are solely comprised of strings without percussion. For Ave Maria by Calli as part of the Donnie Darko soundtrack, in spite of simply listening to it as the DVD end credits were playing, the soprano was not lost in the naturally bass-heavy background which deepened, nor was it as sibilant as older, even cheaper headphone sets. Its handling of classical music and film soundtracks is better than you have any right to expect for less than £20.

The good news doesn’t stop there, when switching to rock and pop, the age-old problem of singles with louder recording levels than the same tracks on an album was tested with the song “Discotheque” by U2. The album version was given enough of a bass boost that we were able to put the single on the shelf and stick with the whole “Pop” album.

The same improvement occurred with music from tape, which we had transferred to CD, although the production quality of Massive Attack’s “Safe From Harm” should be easy for any half-decent headphones to handle. We also updated our over-produced modern pop category with Don’t Cha by the Pussycat Dolls, and the ensemble of voices on the chorus was weighted and accurate, and the bouncing bass richer and deeper than expected.

Nothing is perfect though, and if you’re looking for any tangible flaw, it’s that bass is all that the HD201s will lend to your skinny weakling MP3s (though not as much as the ridiculously low end HD Master DJ-targeted range). We were listening on a Marantz CD Player, which could supply enough bass through its headphone socket to make it worthwhile. Without proper amplification you would need to crank up the level of your recordings in a package like Goldwave to get the best out of the headphones, another reason to keep the HD201s at home - through a 900-series Sony Minidisk Walkman, the sound was good but quiet without some digital trickery to crank up the volume of recordings before transferring to MD.

Tags: Audio Headphones Sennheiser

Sennheiser HD-201 headphones originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Sun, 22 Jan 2006 22:00:22 +0000

One year after we reviewed Doom 3, Quake 4 has landed. It reintroduces us to the war with the Strogg race and you play Marine Matthew Kane once more, but adding the kind of storytelling and graphical improvements you’d expect for a gap of 8 years between instalments. Quake II’s green shades scrub up nicely on the Doom 3 engine, but thankfully most of the rest of the time, you won’t be creeping around, more like machine gunning everything in sight with squads to match while imagining yourself in a James Cameron film.

Taking some heed of Doom 3’s eyestrain-inducing darkness, Raven has equipped two weapons with an optional torch, usable all the time and creating atmosphere in certain key sections. Although you will end up with better looking versions of all the Quake weapons, the original marine machine gun and shotgun, which hark back to Doom, will be the most popular for creating that action movie feel. Every weapon also has a visual or numerical ammunition counter, further enhancing the feel of being in James Cameron’s Aliens. Forget the one to two at a time spawning of Doom 3: In Quake 4 the enemy can mass rush and attack as quickly as your rate of fire, especially the basic footsoldiers and in spite of the robotic nature of the enemy there’s the regular amount of blood and gore you’d expect, keeping the certificate at 18.

In Quake 4 you’re at war on an alien planet, so even when you have to escort someone as an objective the non-player character (NPC) is usually armed and can look after himself - except when the script demands that he can’t. It’s a shame there aren’t many moments where you can save a Marine at the last minute and have it make a difference to the storyline. However when you have a whole squad with you, you do find yourself watching their back and they do a much better job of watching yours than say, the Starfleet support in Elite Force from five years ago, showing the progress in AI and the effective feel of the weapons. These squads are much closer to Call of Duty in their speed and AI and the fact that they’ll actually fight for you.

If you’ve ever watched The Best of Both Worlds from the end of the third series of Star Trek The Next Generation, then you’ll know what the twist is - otherwise you can read the back of the box. If they had concealed the twist it would have made the fact that there’s an impossible boss fight more exciting in terms of how long you could last. Harking back to Half-Life Gunman there’s also one encounter where you’re tricked into believing the first time you see this particular enemy, is the right time to try and destroy it. Though the assimilation harks back to the television of 15 years ago, it’s surprising that once you become “Stroggocop”, it makes you all the more involved in the story from a payback point of view, especially once you get the obligatory glimpse of yourself in the mirror. The other dimension, very reminiscent of Half-Life, is the way that Strogg health stations become available to you, which you will certainly need.

It’s not all great though, some people complain that the relentless action is too linear but even those complainers are silenced when you reach the barrel-shifting scene - that’s right, you have to move a platform and some barrels to reach the next level, this is after arriving too late to save a colleague who sent you off to do something and in the style of Scary Movie, you know they’re dead meat. The last thing you want to do after seeing a fellow marine dragged under a door to their death is shift stupid boxes and this one moment can reinstate your disbelief - even playing late at night, the last thing you need is an excuse to quit. It’s also not a new complaint that you can physically walk through the same section twice, but the enemy will only spawn when you trip an invisible wire or pick up a weapon - another touch which can bring you out of the game world if you know everything’s lying in wait as opposed to the occasional feeling of being hunted down from Doom 3 and AVP. When they do attack though it’s as frenzied as Call of Duty, AVP and Quake 2’s group attack scenes all mixed together.

Vehicles are also present in a first for the Quake series but routine for rival first person action games. There are gun platform trucks, a tank and a Mechwarrior-styled walker which is thankfully much simpler to operate than the Battletech equivalent - they are a diversion for PC players but obviously intended to make Quake console friendly in time for being a Xbox360 launch title. When using a mouse they are, thankfully, very easy to handle, the difficulty level chosen only affecting damage rates.

The multiplayer is basically Quake III with a couple of team add-ons, rendered to near perfection in the Doom 3 engine. The previous title always favoured the hardcore deathmatching scene above the many modes of Unreal Tournament, and it’s wise of iD and Raven to go retro for now and see how many players they can hold on to ahead of UT 2007’s release in Spring 2006. The first patch has removed CD checking straight away but without wiping savegames in the single player mode like Quake II. For once, both sides of the game’s community have reason not to hate patch day and we expect this traditionally high standard of support to continue.

If you never liked Quake III, you’re unlikely to bother with Q4’s multiplayer in spite of Raven giving it the Counter-Strike: Source treatment. If Unreal Tournament doesn’t excite in the way it used to though, there’d be nothing wrong with giving it a try. However, since there is a solely multiplayer game in the works, currently titled Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, it’s suddenly clear why you’re being asked to brush up on your Quake III reflexes - you’ll need them if you’re planning to buy Battlefield 2 in space.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Activision

Quake 4 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 09 Dec 2005 00:10:46 +0000

We all lament the dearth of original games on the PC platform, especially now we’re in the season of sports games which are about to have another year tagged onto the end of their titles. Yet original games, when they arrive, are hardly given a second thought by the same complainers. This wasn’t a problem, which affected bedroom coders Introversion, famous for using the pub as their boardroom and an excellent modern update of the C64 classic Hacker, known as Uplink. The rest is history, and thanks to a bad American publishing deal, the devs were nearly history too. Now that their latest work Darwinia has dropped from full price to top-end of budget pricing from its spring launch, we plonked our cash down to take a look.

The first good sign is allowing buyers of the game to download it immediately direct from the site (measuring 250Mb), allowing near-instant play without waiting for the CD. Next, the packaging, graphics and action scream retro but with a modern set of twists and turns; the lead character’s a Clive Sinclair parody, with some mocked-up loading screens from a Spectrum to match (Rockstar aren’t the only retro kings with that trick); you are transported into the land of Darwinia in a Matrix-like all-encompassing manner, which fans of Tron the movie, and the v2.0 game, will immediately appreciate this, and the casting of a modern bugbear, the virus, as the game’s nemesis.

However, C&C fans will find themselves almost drowning at the difference in interfaces, even if the unit trees for this RTS are a lot shorter - it’s not laid out on a plate for you, you have to take the world, using Ground-Control mouse movement for the camera (but also the WSAD keys if you like) to zoom in, see the red on the map and destroy it - among other tasks. There is some resource gathering but neither that, nor the saving of the stick-man-like Darwinians, dominate the game, everything has a balance throughout the game’s 20 levels. Since the handling of the Squads bring back memories of quintessential classics like Cannon Fodder and in turn, the Syndicate games, all in a landscape reminding you of Geoff Crammond’s The Sentinel but taking in some modern lighting effects.

Get used to the world and after a while, it’s beautiful in its own way without needing half your hard disk for textures - like modern games, and in addition to those PC classics, the flourishing yet edgy graphics also bring to mind the arcade classic Robotron 2084 when you’re making the virus race eat laser for breakfast, and Lemmings when you have to create officers to route the little green men to safety. During the protection/rescue missions, all is not lost if you should lose some Darwinians, provided you can collect their souls.

This can let you back into a protection level if you’re losing, as long as you’re a fast collector. However that means your mouse-tracing skills for commands and creation have to be top-notch otherwise you can find yourself overwhelmed and you will be screaming for either some easy C&C-styled key commands, or a Wacom light pen instead of a mouse. If messing up the commands happens too often, you’ll be glad there’s no multiplayer for some kid on the net to laugh at you.

That’s it ... but this nutshell’s a lot bigger than my description suggests, I’ve been playing it since before the disk arrived and it’s another PC game, after World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike Source, where having to get this review to my boss was too much of an inconvenience to my entertainment, hence the delay. The soundtrack by Paul Slocum, Mathieu Stempel and Trash80, much like Jesper Kyd’s work for the IO Interactive range of games, mixes styles from C64 SID chip to modern movie style and is highly memorable - and rather handily available for sale on the website straight away as an optional extra, rather than Introversion wacking a tenner on the price and trying to make you buy the game again, or restricting the soundtrack to an import - you can pick it up for the price of a games mag.

Since Half-Life 2 and Rome Total War, we’ve really been FPSing and RTSing and driving our way through our games waiting for the next big but memorable experience, and it took the ripping-up of the RTS rulebook, with a gaming lineage of the past two decades, to make me excited about games again - even if the game isn’t going to need all the power of the 64-bit PC upgrade I’ve just made, unlike HL2’s Lost Coast. Darwinia will happily work on a sub-1GHz PC as long as you’ve got 512Mb RAM and a basic video card - though you’ll appreciate more RAM when there are hundreds of Darwinians and enemy viruses on the screen. In retail sales the game has dropped to as low as 10 pounds. However, the test is whether you value originality enough to see the company survive to release its third game - in which case snap it up from the Introversion website, and if you like the music, the soundtrack too. At least one of the striking screenshots is also available as a poster if the desktop wallpaper seems too small.

Tags: Gaming PC games RTS Introversion Software

Darwinia - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 04 Nov 2005 00:18:35 +0000

We’ll let you into a little secret: I’ve been enjoying this headset too much to get round to reviewing it in its own right, although it was used for comparison purposes with Sennheiser’s PC 155 set (reviewed here) last year. Frankly, Plantronics’ only problem is when to discontinue this classic, wallet-friendly headset with the killer noise cancelling microphone and cans that compete with - and beat some - hi fi headphones in the same bracket. If I’m being brutal, any other set underneath the 90s other than the 60s, could be axed and I wouldn’t really care as long as the top of this range survived.

The cable is a nice, long and true 3m and the 3.5mm jacks are similarly strengthened in rigid plastic. The volume control can be fixed with a handy shirt clip and features a mute for the volume. There have been some complaints about the cabling online but I’ve been placing my full weight on a single metal chair leg along various parts of the 3m wire for the past year or so as well as dropping the headset at various angles more than ten times from just under a height of 3ft - and they’re still working, although the rubber inner balancing band for the headphones has had to be re-attached. For our review sample anyway, it’s fared much better than the DJ-targeted Sennheiser HD 200s which needed to go for repair after a single drop. So, the Audio 90s are, from my experience, ready for a good battering unlike many modern gadgets. The fact that they look functional (or to iPod fans, ugly) and you’ll never take them out of the house also helps the lastability in a big way.

In essence, that’s it…until it’s time to use them. The rubber inner band allow the 90s to adjust to a wide variety of head shapes, helped by the deliberate choice to let the headphone stalks to be pushed by your ears out to a width of around 8in - much like the Sennheiser PC155s but for spending £60 less, it uses two bands. Starting with the microphone we were happy to find we could talk to our friends in Canada and they commented that we were quite clear and had to ask to turn the television off as they could hear the news- up until then they were struggling to hear us on cheaper analog headsets.

Start a game and the sound effects will immediately pound your eardrums, so for repetitive stabbing sounds like explosions and gunshots in Counter-Strike Source, or any other wargame, care must be taken not to have them up too loud. We’ve worn them for hours at a time for just working at the PC and listening to music though.

It’s with music that the Audio 90s are a revelation - lacking the refined stage which the Sennheiser PC155s will create (and not really expecting one for £30 as opposed to almost £100), the Audio 90s will instead give you bass - more bass than you’d expect for the price, although once again, not more than a set of headphones without a mic, dedicated to DJing. The Plantronics set is often helped by having a wider outer fur pad covering the earpieces (by half a centimere in circumference), making them more open-backed and airy than the Sennheisers though.

This means that the higher frequencies aren’t necessarily drowned out as you’d expect, giving you a much more laddish, upfront, attacking sound for music. Even so, when required, such as on Christopher Young’s Entrapment soundtrack score, the Audio 90s can be shockingly subtle. However the headset’s better with strings and guitars than piano. In the track where it switches from score to guitars though, the attacking power of the 90s is at its peak, so film soundtracks with equal amounts of synth and drums could still be appreciated. The 15th Century Ave Maria by Calli from Donnie Darko finally defeated the 90s with its multiple layers of choir singing. However for The Replacement Killers soundtrack, the two sets were about equal with Harry Gregson-Willams’ mixture of synths and sampled orchestra. While you wouldn’t listen to classical-based soundtracks through the Audio 90s all the time, for music accompaniment in games the headset’s balanced enough.

For the Bond song test, the Plantronics set separated Shirley Bassey’s overpowering voice and those subtle bongo drums in the final chorus teased out by the digital remastering, while the clipped 80s sound of Duran Duran on View To A Kill was suitably tight. It gave weight to overproduced pop like Madonna and Britney, made the horns in Jay-Z’s production of Beyonce’s Crazy in Love even more funky and her voice (including the “O-O” vocal break) was balanced with the background track, again not allowed to take over the whole song. The guitars and slap of the snare drum on Justin Timberlake’s Like I Love You, once again, stood out well from the singer’s voice.

Tags: Audio Headsets Plantronics

Plantronics Audio 90 headset originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 10 Jun 2005 00:09:51 +0100

World domination or more of the same old RTS? We take a look at Atari’s Act of War to see whether it can break away from the mould and take over your life as you try and take over the world.

Atari’s Act Of War boasts a storyline crafted by Dale Brown, author of the novel of the same name and the live-action cutscenes bring to mind memories of earlier C&C entries such as Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2. Digital Video technology means the clips look great, and it’s smart to have the introductory setup shown to us as we load, given that it’s a DVD-only game.

As with most games of this genre and following the novel’s storyline, it’s all about a crisis and for Act of War is an energy crisis that has forced nations to turn against each other so they can turn the lights on. Petrol prices have gone up to $7 a gallon (in the UK anyway, just like today then - but that’s like the apocalypse for America) and the battle for energy means that you’ll be fighting for it across the world. Handily for Brits you’ll start in London before jetting off to Russia, America twice, Libya and Egypt, so the terrain’s hardly dull.

This reliance on cutscenes means that while the storyline gets to unravel around the missions you can be left itching to get into it way before you ever get the chance. Once you’ve got past your short movie you are dropped into a game and given some objectives, and one of the great strengths here is the addition of secondary missions that you can attempt while getting on with the main battle. This means a lot of use is made of single maps at a time. Nothing wrong with that, but when you eventually win the day (you guessed it…) there’s more video to watch. You can’t help thinking that it would have been better to put all the video on a separate disk and let us watch everything after the installation cutscene in our own time (just as you can read the book).

Balancing out the waiting around for the action, an additional strength is, you can zoom all the way in to see large-scale third person battles before zooming back out again to plan your units’ movements. Resembling RTS classic Ground Control, this is an advantage when you’ve got so much to manage, or you can simply treat it like another cutscene but using the game engine.

Unfortunately there’s the usual kind of AI pathfinding problems that plague all but the best RTS games. Most of the time there’s one man, Major Jefferson, who must be kept alive at all times, he’s like the Command APC of Act Of War - i.e. the mission’s over when he dies. Since he’s just a man who doesn’t even start with a vehicle, the good thing is Jefferson can be left behind while you get on with the fighting. So, seeing him, or a platoon of new soldiers, walk straight into the most dangerous parts of the level or split into groups when moving around larger objects can be frustrating, even if it’s par for the course in this field.

Tags: Gaming PC games RTS Atari

Act Of War - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 29 Apr 2005 17:32:12 +0100

Every single time I’ve sat down to write this review, I’ve always thought “best research it some more by playing a round or two”. It’s usually 2am by the time I’ve finished, and for the update, 4am. We also make no apologies for having taken all the screenshots after death- stand still in this game and it’s curtains for that round. In addition, CSS is an online game - there wouldn’t have been remakes of the classic Prodigy and Train maps back in November when the game was shipped together with Half-Life 2, which have contributed to making the game even better.

That’s nothing new though. Counter-Strike’s move to the Source Engine has ushered in better animation on the hostages, who finally look like human beings, and everything’s much more physical - allowing weapons and scenery to get scattered, windows clearly broken, and falling from ladders more painful than before. The welcome benefit of this remake is that even if you have the very basic weapon in each class (which were rubbish in the old v1.6), you have a better chance of taking on someone with superior equipment. Either this, or you could pick something you’re comfortable with and practice until you’re a real threat with it, even though you might have other items in your arsenal. You’re now allowed two flashbang grenades, which unfortunately work as well on your own side as the enemy. For the counter-terrorists in a DE (bomb prevention) map, the humble defuse kit and therefore speed of defusal, can decide the difference between victory and defeat. You can now pick up fallen kits and grenades from the dead - the former giving CTs a chance if they’re delayed on the way to the bomb, the latter being useful to either side.

It’s a simple pair of scenarios in Counter-Strike; either prevent the terrorists from bombing a site, or succeed. In CS maps you must rescue all the hostages, or stop the counter-terrorists from doing so. In both storylines, the basic team deathmatch option of wiping out the opposing side is also available. The VIP escort mode has been dropped, along with the other terrorist character skins. CSS takes the most popular elements of what went before and revs them up, and while you expect good graphics, it was a surprise to see readable lettering on the terrorist bomb’s IDE cable, and animated numbers as you arm or defuse it. That’s the level of attention to detail with which Valve remade these maps and the game, and we couldn’t change the subject without mentioning the lighting effects in the new version of Prodigy, which ape the Doom III “swinging lights” trick and sparking bare wires.

When it was launched we hadn’t seen the 10,000 server-strong peak as we did in its heyday four years ago, but that all changed a few weeks later, as is the nature of online games when updated - we’ve seen 13, 500 servers for CSS when it was reloaded. Neither could we have predicted players happily forking out for server costs if they enjoyed a game as much as this- which they are doing globally in their thousands, both on a casual and organised clan basis. Only the redesigned CT character models have put a strain on less than new computers throughout all the Steam updates but to really enjoy single-player HL2, you needed 1Gb of RAM. That level of memory will be more than enough for CSS, with a processor standing at 1.2GHz. Although we’ve torture tested a PIII/733 and received above average performance, the faster the better as always with PC Games.

In the Half-Life 2 review we remarked that 3D Shooter fans would find out what it was like to get hooked on a game, in the manner of Championship Manager players. CSS is an even better comparison, because you’re much more likely to dig your heels in and hope for improvement throughout multiple rounds on one map (much like a football match which your team is losing). This is where your time will disappear. The game’s enjoyable, but when you’re stuck on a losing streak, it’s also cruel to continually get beaten and you keep thinking “next round” or “next map” - even when the next map can be half an hour to an hour away. In the longer-timed games, generally you’ll be able to cram in 15 rounds if they’re short sharp confrontations. This also depends on the number of players in the server as well, on average it’s 16, but the larger servers and maps can see 32, and these play more like Unreal Tournament than Counter-Strike- but are still great fun. The bots have also received a tweak, so depending on the server, these will present a real and sometimes unreal challenge, as there’ll be no lag to slow them down. The “Zombie” mod can see up to 16 bots with knives versus four human CTs, making for fast paced hunting, but of course this is best enjoyed on the larger maps.

The only limit to the fun is whether you like or hate the maps on the server rotation. For me, the Aztech map, which had three versions prior to Source, is all played out and I tend to skip servers if it comes up. Some other people will only play the two Dust maps and rotate their server endlessly based on them. Thankfully there are so many servers, that it’s a rare occasion when you’re stuck for a game. The only other gripe is that after some automated updates, it will take a while for the game to remember your favourite servers or you have to search and bookmark them all over again. In that case, it’s best to at least remember the server names or even write the IP addresses down in order to find them as quickly as possible.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Vivendi Universal

Counter-Strike: Source originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 01 Apr 2005 20:50:06 +0100

For once we can believe the packaging; TDK's BP100 in-ear headphones are as comfortable as TDK says, greatly helped by the rubberised parts. I can't stand in-ear headphones. However I was forced to admit, in spite of the short cable, it was easy to adjust the set for comfort. Deliberately shaking my head to make them fall out of my ears didn't work and unlike lesser phones, you don't need to shove these so far into your ears that they might get stuck.

When judging sound quality, 11dB less sensitivity than the neckband version fails to diminish the sound. Given that it's right against your eardrums, it helps to focus what you're hearing. There was only one case where we missed that additional range and that was with Enya's voice on the first Lord Of The Rings Soundtrack, which was slightly boxed in compared to the Neckband NP100s. The bigger brother of the range brought through her voice plus Howard Shore's score; the BP100s were above average with the strings but the voice was a step too far. However the operatic score, Ave Maria by Calli from Donnie Darko's soundtrack, fared better on the BP100s than the Neckband set. You could hear the rasping sound of bow on string for Christopher Young's Entrapment soundtrack, which was better quality than expected. Shirley Bassey won the battle between chorus and instruments on Goldfinger from the remastered Bond Compilation, but the bongo drums were discernible, if not totally separated, from the buildup to the end with Bassey's full soprano.

Tags: Audio Headphones TDK

TDK BP100 Headphones originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 04 Jan 2005 11:09:35 +0000

TDK’s NP100 headphone set aims clearly at walkman users, and what you see is what you get with them- just the Sony-styled neckband cans and 1.1m of cable.

It’s a good job that this design hugs the ears, so that you’re not taken away from the sound in any way, although unlike a conventional closed-back pair, some sound will simultaneously get in (like in traffic or on the underground) and leak out for others to hear you broadcasting, according to how far you raise the volume to compensate. Listening to them as you work at a desk gives you a pleasant quality. In that case it’s sad that even turning your head will threaten you with whiplash- had the cable been 1.5m that would have allowed a minimum amount of travel.

There’s not much to dislike about the NP100s other than the length. The sound is upfront, so the snares on Justin Timberlake’s Like I Love you are razor shape and the vocals are brought to the forefront, rather than going for the deepest bass in the world- that’s left to whatever your player can do to adjust the sound, or it’ll just give you what your portable is capable of without any extra base/EQ changes, as if you’d hit the source direct or tone disable on your amplifier.

We didn’t find the NP100s sucking up battery life like heavier ‘phones either. They did hit their limits with operatic soundtrack music such as Ave Maria by Calli (from the Donnie Darko soundtrack), where Lesley Garrett combined with the surrounding bassy orchestra just proved too much for them, but that was a deliberate push to see what would happen. When the high female vocals were sampled and filtered in dance music, they fared slightly better. The best surprise was when we located the booming Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger from a remastered Bond compilation - the bongos at the end were audible and the instruments balanced where cheaper sets would lose the background to the vocals. There was also enough bass weight to reflect the improved production on Duran Duran’s View To A Kill and A-Ha’s Living Daylights. If the production had been lacking though, the NP100s wouldn’t have had anything in reserve to try and improve it like pricier headsets.

Tags: Audio Headphones TDK

TDK NP100 headphones originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 28 Dec 2004 07:46:53 +0000

In Late November 1998, what were you doing? Can you even remember? PC Gamers can. They were finally celebrating the release of Half-Life, that game which had been delayed for at least two years. Developers Valve squeezed every last drop from the original Quake Engine and people were feverishly adding Voodoo 2 cards and RAM to upgrade for it. Only the fans were in on it, everyone else was taken by storm as they battled to escape the Black Mesa Complex. The rest is history, which repeated itself when Counter-Strike, a multiplayer military mod re-adopted by developers Valve and given the same level of support as Half-Life, held a record for the highest number of servers worldwide for almost two years. This record was assisted by the re-release of the Generation pack, which absorbed every new add-on and brought Blue Shift back from the Dreamcast to the PC, and let the sales carry on mushrooming.

Since then, the bar has been raised by many other First Person Shooters, not least of them the horror-filled and movie-licensed Aliens vs Predator, released six months after Half-Life in the UK, followed by Unreal Tournament on the multiplayer side, Deus Ex, Elite Force, Medal of Honour, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, Vietcong, Halo and Far Cry as games that stood out and gave a bright, bold new experience which others did not. The penultimate game on the list would have been the Half-Life of 2003 had it reached the PC with its features intact. Let’s not forget Doom III, which had the weight of its own history to deal with (as well as its own torturous wait) only three months ago. True to form, Valve have been drip-feeding fans for 18 months from E3 2003 but general delays and the small matter of code theft, pushed it further back - just history repeating itself. Now here we are. All the build up and the frustration and the waiting, is forgotten when you hear that single guitar chord for Valve’s jingle.

The presentation screen is no longer static, with the radios of the City Guards patrolling giving you a sense of where you are about to enter. The other difference is a widescreen mode and the ability to select chapters to replay, which help blur that game/movie line further than before and there are so many loading points, the one advantage is very little need to save early on as you’ll have a bundle of auto-saves which load more quickly. This makes up for the slower loading on machines closer to the minimum specification.

We’re not giving out plot details I’m afraid, although it’s no great spoiler to know that the G-Man’s much publicised improved facial movements are given a thorough demonstration right at the start, before the slightly shortened introductory titles - you are given slightly less of the surroundings than in the first game’s train ride, making it a bigger shock as you happen upon the first open square of the city. Then characters that were little more than fast food for the aliens in the first game, reappear as much more rounded, individual characters, helped by the use of the same voice actors. The first couple of levels are fairly linear and in my wandering I was wondering when the first shock would hit; true to form I’d walked past the ladder I needed several times. There’s still plenty of the platformer in HL2 and another heralded feature is the ability to move crates and other medium weight objects around when you need climbing blocks or very makeshift shields. As you travel around you have the choice of allowing surveillance to follow you, or, when you have a weapon, violently terminating the connection.

Like Half-Life, you’ll have interactions with several strangers who will feed you little clues or story advancements. Thankfully there isn’t too much build up, Valve realising this is a sequel. That’s why when the action begins, it’s like you’re kicked to “We Got Hostiles” from the original game when you’re taking on the city guards with guns - and you’ll think “finally”. The grunts aren’t dumb- if you’re getting too close they’ll take cover or try to flank you, and there will be several moments where you’ll try to push each other too near the exploding barrels. The difference between the original and HL2 is, it’s not like you could put the barrels precisely where you wanted before to make such a perfect trap in the first game.

Good graphics are a given nowadays. HL2 tries and largely succeeds in giving you a living, breathing and in some cases, near-war-torn city. That’s helped by the engine of course- smash a box for example, and it now folds out flat instead of just exploding, and we could list the quirks of the engine’s physics until the cows came home. Update your video drivers, defragment your hard disk before you play and aside from the occasional judder, a 1.5GHz PC with Radeon card and 768Mb RAM will handle the game. Anything faster/over 2GHz and 1Gb RAM should only have to put up with audio stutters although as usual, physical PCI soundcards will suffer slightly less than the integrated variety, which would have to fight even harder for resources. The machine’s not as much of a vampire as Doom III, but really demands everything from your hardware.

It’s an achievement to celebrate that the game’s actually here, and we’ll treat Counter-Strike Source in a separate review. Making everyone authenticate HL2 over Steam before playing has caused the servers to crash out for a while, though they seem to be coping with demand now. Some fault-finders are racing through the game and completing it in around 20 hours. They’re insane. Rack up the difficulty to maximum and enjoy the experience, and while that will add 7-10 hours to the playing time if you aren’t a hardcore gamer, that’s the way to enjoy this brilliant game, where the money’s on the screen and you can see the result of almost totally independent games development with no publisher interference. The CD version is in our opinion, pointless and since the game requires at least 4.4Gb of space with Counter-Strike, you might as well spend another £20 to upgrade make sure you can buy the DVD if you only have a CD-ROM drive- it’ll definitely be one of the cheapest upgrades you’ll make to accommodate the game.
However, take time out and get ready for it, as it’s hideously addictive. Action gamers who couldn’t understand the pulling power of Championship Manager, will now understand. On my first play it was a six-hour stretch, slowed down by my “testing” and enjoying the game at my own pace, but the other four hours drew me in once the story picked up. It’ll make you late for work, mess with your mind, endanger your relationships - everything budding football managers know, will happen to the action crowd, and it’s the first time when it’s almost worth it for a game this good. Just buy it. Looking past the hype and the history, you have an A-list single player title for which more content is on the way. Then you have the re-interpretation of the most popular multiplayer mod based on that game, both in the same box. So if you pay £28 (the average internet price), that’s £14 for two big games, the second of which won’t reach an “end” of a story and can be played with friends. In fact, that’s a cue to remember the co-op mod is in production with full Valve approval for the single-player. So, there’s nothing to dislike, as long as you make it last.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Vivendi Universal

Half Life 2 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 19 Nov 2004 07:39:54 +0000

Rather than rush in with a review on the first day, we’ve battled demons, fought monsters and come close to death to bring you this review. We went back to the start, completed the two previous versions of this game and realising how things can change as a game wears on, decided that to write a review of what is probably one of the most famous of First Person Shooters needed to complete Doom 3 before we presented our verdict. Two months later and we can truly say we’ve been to hell and back - three times. So what did we think - read on…

It’s been nearly a decade since the last Doom game, so expectations had been high ever since its announcement. That’s commonplace for all Id Software games and like Half-Life 2 and Halo 2, the game had its similarly commonplace early code leak during development.

The premise is the same as the last two; all hell breaks loose- literally- and you’ve got scores of much smarter and smarter-looking lethal beasts to send back there. Of course, you will have a host of different weapons at your disposal, but one-shot kills are left back in the 1990s when playing at higher skill levels.

The difference is evident in the exquisite engine. The product of several years’ work, it looks great (but with Half-Life 2 on the way, we’ll reserve judgement on which looks best) and the lighting and atmosphere are as cinematic as the cut-scenes. This creates a less frenetic pace than the average 3D shooter and in the early stages, less melee attacks. Like the Quake series, equal effort has gone into the soundtrack and sound effects to rack up the tension. Doom 3 certainly matches AVP for the fear experience - albeit without the speed. Visually this is especially true on ATI’s Radeon cards, though this is Doom and Id- just bring as powerful a PC as possible to the party and you’ll have the best time. Like Doom II putting 486 SX PCs on the scrapheap in 1994, Doom 3 brings you only the second game after Far Cry, which is happiest on a gigabyte of memory.

Spread over 27 levels, the modern versions of the old monsters are understandably tougher - especially the new “pinky” demon. This beast has the speed and destructive force as Serious Sam’s exploding bull and demands equally good reflexes. Similarly, the new imp has a leap attack similar to the Fox film movie monsters in AVP. The former human security personnel are also tough and won’t roll over easily. Only the zombies are comparative cannon fodder, but can use tools to bludgeon and slowly but surely erode your health if you let them get too close.

Occasional help will arrive in the form of sentry bots. These machines will crawl ahead of you and wipe out any enemies until their ammunition is exhausted, or they are destroyed. Restocking cabinets provide more health or ammunition throughout the game. You’ll find PDAs from dead personnel or abandoned offices as you travel. These take the place of the coloured keys of ten years ago. Reading the emails and voice broadcasts help you find the combinations to both supply cabinets and the doors linking subsections or the end of levels. Last but not least, the occasional real/spoof website offers more clues.

While the corridors get longer and the lighting ever more spooky, aside from proceeding through the storyline and interactive cut-scenes (where you only had one or two in the previous games), without giving that story away, that’s the game. Like AVP it’s best played at night, as you battle your way through 27 levels of horror, so on Veteran you have an easy 20 hours of gameplay if you are anything less than expert.

While the game only takes up 1.5Gb of hard drive space, the save games will soon push that to 2Gb if you’re a “safety saver”. If quick saving takes away your concentration, you generally find health and supplies at the right time after heavy attacks to let you go through levels to the end where it will autosave. At least the game makes no bones about taking all your PC’s resources and still demanding more. In fact my reduction in speed is most probably due to the Athlon 1800+, in spite of the 768Mb RAM supporting it. It’s probably the Athlon XP 2400+ with its true 2GHz clockspeed that should serve as a minimum, with more than 512Mb RAM.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS id Software

Doom 3 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 18 Oct 2004 10:15:38 +0100

There’s hardly anything to this Pinnacle kit unlike the massive studio sets we’ve reviewed recently. It’s just the box, the USB lead, the installation CD and that’s it. It’s another device entirely open and honest about the need for USB 2.0 for the minimum of dropped frames - and also an old-fashioned aerial to pick up a signal.

It takes you back to the days of the earliest Philips and Hauppauge TV kits as the software will seek out your channels, you save the presets and then off you go. Essentially, that’s all there is to it. If you’re using a screen with a Trinitron Tube (and Diamondtron screens too), you’ll get slightly better quality, as seen with some DVDs. If you have a flatpanel it’s much less of an issue - the only problems we can see on the horizon are the position of the computer and where your aerial can be hung for the best reception, and the potential for eyestrain if you’re not sat several feet away.

Last but not least is the increase in power usage of your computer over a television. If you have a show on while you’re surfing (and let’s face it any soap can be watched with the pictures off nowadays) then that’s fine. However using a PC just for TV could be wasteful (and noisier) compared to buying a real 14-28inch model for the bedroom. Of course, don’t think the computer will let you escape a TV licence either.

Pinnacle’s input and contribution to this situation is a handy remote control with all the expected features and real buttons for the virtual VCR, or PVR functionality, so you can watch from a distance. The camcorder in the diagram signifies Pinnacle’s bread and butter video capture function. Sadly, if you want Time Shifting, SVCD and DVD quality for burning recordings, you’ll be required to pay a charge. That’s the ultimate catch that makes the PCTV USB2 a turn-off.

Tags: Cameras Video And Editing Video editing software Pinnacle CeBIT2004

Pinnacle PCTV USB2 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 12 Oct 2004 11:36:32 +0100

Look at the package. Aside from the two CDs and manual, this blue box that looks like a child’s fist is all there is to the package, which plugs into your USB 2.0 port after you’ve installed the Pinnacle Studio 9 software. Of the current range, only the 90 demands USB 2.0 but the faster the better.

This package has no cables, something we’ve moaned about before on full Pinnacle sets. This Dazzle on the other hand, sports only phono and S-Video connectors. If you’ve had analogue equipment for that long, there’s a better chance you’ll have the cables than if this was targeted at the DV gang. The test camcorder, a six-year-old Sony Hi8, worked first time without any issues, although a VCR of a similar age without Phono outs failed to work through SCART conversion - like last year’s Pinnacle Studio package, it may end up as something of a lottery, trying every VCR in the house.

As usual you need as powerful a machine with as much memory as possible to minimize the dropping of frames and more RAM than the minimum specification of CPU (P4/Athlon 1.6GHz) didn’t alleviate the issue. However it worked first time and the cut-down version of Studio 9, once registered and patched, maintained the simple 1-2-3 system of working to produce another great video CD. If you have a VCR though you’re better off trying higher up the range.

Tags: Cameras Video And Editing Video editing software Pinnacle CeBIT2004

Dazzle Video Creator 90 video editing software originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 11 Oct 2004 12:14:38 +0100

First things first; FA Porsche really shouldn't be taking credit for designing a slab and rounding the edges. The Moviebox looks functional enough, but once you've got two sets of wires going in and out of it, it looks like just another piece of junk tech. Luckily for Pinnacle, the execution of its function fares much better than the way it looks.

This model still suffers the cable blight of the analogue version we tested at the end of 2003 but the Pinnacle assumes you have a DV camcorder, which cuts down on the amount you need to begin with. Even so, for a model purporting continued support for analogue cams it's a pain playing hunt the cable. To be fair, Windows XP Service Pack 1 supports the USB 2.0 ports as required by Studio 9, so there's a high chance any recent upgrading would bring you USB 2.0 ports or the £25 for a card is less of a pain and more of a practical requirement. The balancing platform for the box is much cleverer design although if I were being cynical, it could be suggested that it was to cover up the fact that the mains adaptor cable is the shortest in the bunch.

Thankfully no aspersions can be cast on the documentation, which remains as good as the previous edition. Having said that, video capture is an area still possessing some mystique for the nervous home user, so tutorials and the near-260-page all-English manual tell you everything you need to know. Like an Antivirus package the software will nip off to the internet and search for its latest patch, v9.1.2, which weighs in at a whopping 47Mb. You'll need to register it to get that, and that's a pain by itself just because initially it's confusing whether to name the package Studio Deluxe, Studio AV/DV v9, Studio Moviebox DV v9 or Studio Moviebox USB v9, simply because there's no model on that page with exactly the same name on the box. Once you just pick one by guesswork and have the patch one way or another you're OK, it's just another clumsily executed function. Having to register the product to get updates is an interesting anti-piracy move, but does tend to kill any chance of returning the product if it goes wrong, which could in turn scare newcomers away in favour of just the software and a Firewire card for their DV camera. I also wasn't best pleased after doing a cleanup to install the extra content post-patch, to find that the DOS-box decompression of the sound files promptly crashed my machine out. This may have also contributed to the “uninstallation” leaving 1.3Gb behind when it finished taking out the main studio software.

Once patched, we went back to work. Thanks to USB 2.0's transfer rate, even on the fairly humble 1.5 GHz AMD 1800+ test machine, no dropped frames occurred when we carried out the same tests as before, producing another great retirement party VCD and if we had enough footage to fill a DVD instead, that would have been just a few clicks away.

Tags: Cameras Video And Editing Video editing software Pinnacle CeBIT2004

Pinnacle Studio Moviebox Deluxe 9 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:26:28 +0100

For all those who think Easy Media Creator 7 is too expensive, Roxio has slimmed down the bread and butter of the package. So if you want to design your own labels or do anything the big big package does, you'll need a lot more money and go look elsewhere. Those of you on a budget can tap into the basic Easy DVD Copy, which, not overlooking Roxio's roots, still burns CDs happily.

If you've ever used any Roxio product from the Adaptec days of eight years ago to today, the interface is familiar; insert the disc to be copied in the drive or point out the location of the data to be copied, insert the blank media, choose the speed and whether you want a test burn first, and away you go, repeating the process for however many copies you'd like.

On the surface that's all there is unless you're doing DVD-to-DVD copying when you get greater control by running through the options, for instance, creating your own Superbit discs by ditching the extras and giving you the best possible video quality for just the film. It makes a change to see a publisher making an effort to ensure compatibility for its DVDs though this had been made easier by not bothering with DVD-RAM with or without the caddy and leave that to the makers of all-format drives. DVD being naturally larger, it's useful to have a straight snapshot of what you've got and can select what to copy, keeping the simplicity of the smaller format but re-applying it for the larger capacities.

The software won't copy encrypted or RCE DVDs but of course we wouldn't expect it to. Three years after the introduction of XP, it's unfortunate that Windows ME has been left behind but NT and 2K owners can also pick it up. The sub-£20 price point is right for something on the level that you'd receive free with any new DVD Burner you'd buy, albeit without Roxio's smart skin. Patch it, and it will copy dual-layer DVDs too.

Tags: Software PC software Video editing software Roxio Cameras

Easy DVD Copy originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 14 Sep 2004 15:28:48 +0100

With a company named Alohabob but based in New York and not Hawaii, the makers’ off-the-wall style immediately attracted us. Unlike Norton Ghost, there wasn’t a trace of the program permanently stuck on your system- in at least three different places on the packaging and once in the program setup you are told to upgrade to the latest version, which we duly did before testing, to v4.6.18.29.

A large manual has been spurned in favour of video tutorials and online help to keep printing costs down and make space for the main attraction - the lesser spotted USB A to A cable. Usually they’re A to B for most devices, but the electronics in this one allow a network connection without network cards, a smart move if one or both machines aren’t hooked up with cabled or wireless NICs.

After running Disk Cleanup and Defragmenter on the image to be transferred, you answer a series of questions and choose a range of options, install the software on the destination machine, connect when prompted or set it to use your existing network, and then go away and make a cup of tea while the data copies across. Once finished you can undo it if you’ve changed your mind otherwise run general verification checks on the transferred data or whole partition, and carry on working on the new machine.

Essentially, that’s the program in a nutshell but like all backup suites, you get used to its intricate nature the more you use it. It works all the way down to Windows 95 but it has to be version C, which supported USB transfers. Testing on XP the program may decide, even though it transfers without a problem, that the hardware change may create a re-activation request, so pirates aren’t going to get anywhere with this package. Since it requires you to drop your firewall as one of the provisions, it’s best used while behind a router or by disabling the internet connection while it’s transferring, to avoid the hacking risk.

Tags: Software PC software Utilities Software Alohabob

PC Relocator Ultra originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Sun, 12 Sep 2004 20:58:44 +0100

Although we're not a hardcore PC hardware testing site, here at pocket-lint.co.uk we can't resist a bargain, nor the urge to tell you about one that we find. Also while we deal in PC products occasionally, we haven't been totally blind to the case modding scene.

It's certainly true that the vast majority of users just want a good looking computer case without breaking out the Dremel, blowtorch, safety goggles and spray paint and Jeantech is a name long associated with value, selling mostly through PC World stores in the UK. Last Christmas one of its cases fell to £30 while still sporting a removable motherboard tray- an unheard-of milestone. We thought that was the best they had to offer until the JNH-60 arrived.

Nicknamed “Phong” (Breeze), this ATX midi-tower steel case sports four large optical drive bays and seven for hard disks with two of the latter externally accessible for floppy drives or media reader trays. The left side of the case has a mounting for an 80mm fan, so using one with LED functionality will let you have your lights- but a plastic baffler will also extract hot air. It's helpful even if it doesn't necessarily line up with the CPU's heatsink and fan for Athlon XP models. On the other hand Barton CPU users whose coolers do measure 80mm should find this touch a stroke of genius.

The nickname “Breeze” is probably derived from the pair of adjustable 120mm fans, with motherboard power connectors, mounted at the front and rear of the case. The front fan is also bolstered with a dust filter and both coolers are controllable with side-mounted dials located above the USB 2.0 and audio ports you can wire up to your motherboard, if the board has the right pins. The rear fan has an embossed hexagonal finger guard, another quality touch that belies the street price.

The side panels are fixed using large bolts making detachment a screwdriver-free exercise. No PSU is supplied, so this case is primarily aimed at people transplanting whole systems as I was. In spite of permanently pushing out blanking plates, no fingers were cut. In fact the stamped-in blanking plates and the front buttons moving at slight angles were the only sign that the case was a budget model. Unlike its sister case the JN-424SB it had no removable tray, but there's enough room to work inside this case without one.

So why should you take any notice of this, it's just another case, right? Its introductory and sale price at PC World is…£30 outside of a sale, going up to an RRP of £35 on the website and £40 in store. For three £10 notes we can put up with flimsy front buttons and chances are you will easily fill all the blanking plate slots at the back if you're transferring all your components from an old case, so only getting two screw-in plates for yourself is no great hardship. The worst thing you may have to do is get new black peripherals and external drives in time so that everything matches. Of course this isn't a life or death priority and can be done as peripherals fail rather than upgrading for purely cosmetic reasons. To round off the package, the quartet of rubber feet are pre-mounted, so if you've laid down a base or surface panel on your carpet the entire system will be raised off the floor, resisting even more dust. The Phong also sweeps aside its elder brother, the £50 JNH-501, which lacks the great cooling system of this new breed.

Tags: Hardware Jeantech

Jeantech Phong Breeze JNH-60 Case originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 17 Jun 2004 16:41:42 +0100

Power Translator Pro 8 boasts that it will deliver all of your translation needs, back and forth, between English and six other languages (French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Russian).

There are also four separate “Vocabulary Block dictionaries” for when you need rapid access to specialist descriptions for business, computing, legal or medical terms. The general method of operation involves transposing the original language text into columns of varying size (or the entire window for translating whole websites), choosing your chosen destination language, then letting the program get on with your translation.

The smallest and the largest applications will probably get the most attention out of the four sections. Logotrans, featuring two window panels on top of each other, puts the starting language at the top with a white background and target translation language below, from any selection of text, with a grey background instead. After this you can add your own text in the language you understand and it will dynamically update the translated copy.

Translation Mirror is certainly the best application for the modern internet. Fire up the site to be translated, start this application, pick the destination language, and it will translate the original page with a higher degree of accuracy than Google's attempts when you search and come across sites not written in your mother tongue.

We're not ignoring Transit, which will cover the short postings that occur with Internet Relay Chat (IRC) or instant messaging applications, nor FileTrans, which will translate the contents of HTML and other files. Both are similarly effective, especially the latter on web pages you've already saved, but we can see Translation Mirror allowing people a transient glimpse at pages they want to see in another language. The killer application is allowing the browsing on the fly of a single site once the Translation mirror has done its work. As an A-Level student in French and German I was taught some new terms but there was the odd literal translation where a dictionary would have had a better turn of phrase. There were also some web elements like scrolling news tickers and advertisements that wouldn't translate but your essential text is what matters- plus you're not spending £65 on this package to learn slang.

Translation speed is dependent on your computer, but a PIII/733 with 512MB RAM took 1-2 minutes to load in and translate new pages. On the AMD 1.5GHz 1800+ with 768Mb RAM that was cut to under a minute. On broadband your lightning-fast page switching will be curtailed depending on how much translated surfing is intended and your computing power It's unlikely you'll want to browse like this all the time, but the package will just sit on your machine, also plugged into Microsoft Word, letting you translate from just one word to pages and pages of information. However it's all this recognition and calculation power that demands over half a gigabyte of hard drive space on installation.

This package succeeds in its intentions, and with five European and one Cyrillic Eastern European language on offer, is aimed at a very wide target market (eg the Spanish set also seeing potential use in America). It depends how many languages you speak as well- if you are relearning your school languages and adding a third like Spanish/Italian, this is worth the money as a kick start to your progress.

Tags: Software PC software Reference Software

Power Translator Pro 8 - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Mon, 14 Jun 2004 13:19:15 +0100

The PC 155s currently sit at the top of the tree in Sennheiser’s PC headset range but there’s been no skimping on sound quality in comparison with its usual mid-to-high-end hi-fi sets. For £90, there’d better not be - but the company has looked at the market and gone one better, to produce a mean contender to Plantronics’ Audio 90 specialised PC set.

Physically, we’ve seen foldable and click-adjustable headphones, but never a set that was designed to bend to the shape of your head. The adjusters are present, but they reside right at the bottom of the band by the cones. The sides of the band hang inwards, giving the 155s a horseshoe look with the overhead pad made of the same felt-covered foam as the ear caps on the cans themselves. Those caps are thick enough to render the unit almost close-backed, with minimal sound leakage even though they don’t entirely cover larger ears.

On the sound quality itself, the 155s present a strong field of bass, primarily because the USB connector bypasses any soundcard so you’re not wasting resources from integrated audio on a PC. Although the soundstage is expansive, it won’t shatter your eardrums at high volumes like the Master HD 200 DJ set. Even so, cutting the bass and treble with the source direct controls is recommended.

To give the cans a thorough workout we selected the orchestral Master And Commander film soundtrack. The plucked violin and cello strings in the 10-minute introduction were sublime, and the cans gave them added weight but didn’t drown the tune in any way. Moving to dance, once again the “no-amplifier-necessary” trait was deployed with Song To The Siren by The Chemical Brothers, with sharp samples and party-hard bass as if you had two bookshelf speakers either side of your head. For vocals, Shirley Bassey’s Goldfinger was well presented, with the instruments given equal bearing until the final renditions of “Gold” at the end of the song when Bassey’s soprano dominates- but those bongo drums poke out from the din. Depeche Mode’s I Feel You (album version) was given new life with the bass for Dave Gahan’s growling voice and the heavy synths and guitars combined. Although games sound effects were excellent, there was no need to have the headset turned up to high levels, as with most other music we heard, thanks to that bass.

We were happy to find the noise-cancelling microphone was also of good quality, folding up and down a good inch or two away from the mouth, but still catching your voice and little extraneous noise- after some adjustment. The cable length is a generous 3 metres but unlike the Master HD range, you’re supplied with an oval cable-tidy to keep it under control and the USB connector actually extends this by 20.2inches/51.2cm.

Unlike the Plantronics Audio 45 USB headset there’s no software to fiddle around with- you literally plug and go with USB and this didn’t fail in either the Pentium or AMD Athlon test machines. Although this is the culmination of what USB aimed for in the first place six years ago, it’s still a shock to see it working so effortlessly. In spite of USB working so well, you can still detach the USB unit and plug the 3.5mm jacks directly into the front speaker/mic terminals if you wish. The PC99 standard colours will match your soundcard (green for speakers, pink for mic). The inline remote uses a white swirl to illustrate the incoming volume in tandem with the PC settings and the mic can be muted with a switch from here to avoid any chance of feedback interrupting.

This quality comes at a price, sadly. Although it’s arguable that the quality’s not in dispute, Plantronics’ Audio 90’s noise-cancelling mic needs next to no adjustment and its volume as well as mute enable/disable can be controlled via the inline remote. Its sound, while more upfront and loud, can do a reasonable job of music and so cannot be dismissed if looking for a new headset and the PC 155’s pricetag is a turn-off.

Tags: Audio Headsets Sennheiser

Sennheiser PC 155 USB originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 10 Jun 2004 18:13:24 +0100

Every so often in the Real Time Strategy Genre, a game other than the Command and Conquer Series moves gameplay and presentation up a notch. In the late 1990s it was the Total Annihilation and the Warcraft series, and although Warzone 2100 flopped, it paved the way for the free flowing partially mouse-controlled camera of Ground Control. Z: Steel Soldiers was also a major improvement on its first game and got the best sales that were expected up against Emperor: Battle for Dune, but was outsold again.

Codemasters seemed to take the view to differ from Generals as much as possible and return to Sci-Fi, and here we find Perimeter developed by KD-Labs. In addition to being the first RTS game where you can shape the landscape like clay with terraforming abilities, it’s only the third RTS where the units themselves can transform to suit the combat or practical task required, like Evolva and Impossible Creatures before it. Add to the fact that your central base (known as a frame) needs energy pylons to link to it if you wish to move, and the energy required to power the eponymous bright blue perimeter, and you can imagine the scale of the task ahead of you.

In fact you don’t need to imagine it because the ludicrously overwrought voiceover will TELL you JUST how IMPORTANT your quest is TO YOUR PEOPLE. It’s cringingly funny although never borders into the downright irritating like Breed’s actors. The story about Mankind getting trapped by its future dependency on the frame and needing to move throughout the universe, under attack by the Scourge, is rubbish. Thankfully that doesn’t detract from the gameplay quality nor the retro electronica soundtack which wouldn’t have been out of place on an Amiga game- no bad thing. There’s little call for the unit rush here, just because the perimeter can be fired up for one attack and not recharge in time for the next. This leads to a frenzy of terraforming for power more than simple real estate so your factories can continue unit production, as well as giving your frame a flexible means of movement- if you can keep those energy tower links active.

The lessons of Ground Control have been learned and re-applied well: the mouse wheel is the “rostrum camera”, allowing the view to pan up and down while moving in a quarter circle in and out of the action, and holding down the middle mouse button gives other movement in addition to Delete and PageDown spinning the camera. In other words it can almost all be done with the mouse depending on the intensity of the battle, another big plus in its favour.

The officers, technicians and soldiers are your basic combination of unit and currency, usually ordered in blocks of ten from the Z/X/C keys. Different amounts of each group assist the creation of different units and it’s safe to assume the more lethal weaponry costs more units, meaning an increase in terraforming for power, and the cycle continues. The Scourge is similarly free-flowing, attacks in packs and the central defence system in the name of the game can result in a false sense of security - there’s no sitting around hitting the perimeter button like a light switch. Your units have to be sent out to carry out the mission, which will allow progress and preservation of the all-important frame. Lose the frame, you lose the game.

It becomes a frantic war of attrition especially on the deliberately smaller maps and the game is worth investing some time to learn the combat system. It’s best to interpret the naff voices in the style of Saturday morning kids’ cartoons you used to watch. My chief complaint is the fact that the units become pig-ugly below the default 1024 x 768 resolution. The game’s a system vampire as well. Even though the looks took a nosedive, the 768Mb of RAM in the test system kept the action at the same speed and the perimeter stayed pretty. The scalability allowed satisfactory visuals at the default resolution even with a 1.5GHz Athlon XP 1800+ but this was partly thanks to a cleaned up system, particularly a defragmented hard drive.

Tags: Gaming PC games RTS Codemasters

Perimeter - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 26 May 2004 20:36:25 +0100

Look at the design and it’s easy to tell that the late great iMac has stamped its identity all over the design of these headphones - including its name. It also extends to the cable, which is sealed in clear moulded green and red plastic. The copper wiring is visible through the translucent cable and so are some of the electronics in the clear green cans.

The ATC-H5s give you 1.5m of cable, so non-walkman usage with a cable this short extends to plugging them into PC speakers on your desk late at night. Any other stationary use would need an extension for users wanting to sit on the sofa while listening. It is however, enough to put your CD Walkman at the bottom of your bag and still wear them with comfort when on the move. The other positive touch is the L-shaped 3.5mm jack, so you’re not fraying the wire if your portable is carried in a pocket.

The other great design touch is the pair of oval-shaped headphone cones, which are properly cushioned for comfort. The cones are held by two upside-down “U”-shaped clamps which themselves can rotate on a metal band surrounded in more rigid plastic. This ingenious design allows the iCool set to fold up and become ultra-portable. Wrapping the cable around the cones will then stop them from getting battered around in your bag (see photo). The top of that band is also padded for comfort and the entire headset can adjust and move easily.

All this great design work would count for nothing had the sound quality been below par. Listening over time allowed us to run in the ATC-H5s properly, since the brand new set had a hard edge to it. Three months later, the iCool headset gives midrange bass weight to MP3 playback but doesn’t swamp the listener with it. When those MP3s are sourced from high-quality audio streams, there’s no additional hiss brought on by the cans like cheaper headsets can create.

Taking some of the sample music we used to test the Proline DM1945MP3 budget CD player, the additional bass- presumably to enhance relatively neutral sound effects from computer soundcards- helped the music much more often than it harmed it.

Modern and potentially overproduced pop like Britney and Madonna’s Me Against The Music was improved by an infusion of low-end power since the production was bright. Justin Timberlake’s voice or the slap of the snare drums wasn’t adversely affected in Like I Love You. Meanwhile in Bond song Goldfinger, the bongo drums in the final climactic chorus were picked out by the iCool headphones in spite of Bassey’s overpowering repetition of the word “Gold” and the other instruments building to the track’s climax, showing an impressive ability with a digitally remastered, 40-year old piece of music Other sound performance commentaries will be available from the forums.

With each sample we tested, the pattern was repeated: more body to the music thanks to the bass with maybe some reduction in volume (and in the case of “Hell’s Angle” by Regular Fries, an EQ adjustment- the only song that needed it) but no swamping and/or overwhelming of the music. If you need to take your Walkman volume all the way down to below 5 out of 20/30, the bass will still let you hear it and the headphone pads will stop other people from being disturbed. The iCool set also passed the public transport test, screening out mobile phones, crying babies and most of the noise of the London Underground.

Tags: Audio Headphones Audio-Technica

Audio-Technica iCool ATC-H5 Headphones originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 18 May 2004 09:20:14 +0100

The packaging for these closed-back headphones features someone DJ-ing which should tell you the primary market at which these cans are aimed. In spite of the rugged and rigid plastic exterior the HD 200s feature Sennheiser's usual high build quality. The rubber spacers around the monitor cones attempt to cover almost any size of ear and unless you just stepped out of a fantasy movie with your Legolas-lookalike ears still attached, there's a high probability they'll fit.

The headband is strongly constructed rigid plastic and the adjustments are made by gently moving them up and down so the cones click into the most comfortable position. Sweat will also take longer to get to the inner pads over the cones thanks to the spacers. Even so every set of 'phones needs the occasional clean.

The HD 200s unleash a frightening amount of bass, almost drowning everything it touches with its low-end embrace. Sometimes this is made worse by the units' closed-back nature which leaves little room for the sound to escape and entertain the entire train carriage For under-produced music this is great, but most of the time you'll be lowering the volume to preserve your hearing. You'll be able to either hear low volumes when listening to music normally, or when DJ-ing you can screen out the other noise around you to cue in and cross/fade records effectively- Whichever way you use them we recommend cutting the extreme high and low frequencies of your amp or mixer- even if the HD200s could take them, your ears probably couldn't.

Cable length is a generous 3 metres. A 2.5mm jack fixes the wire to the left cone, with the other end is the customary 3.5mm with the larger converter for separates and mixers. The single wire has been the fashion for the past five years and is a godsend for not getting in the way.

While Sennheiser pushes the DJ angle, of course the HD 200s can be used for any listening pursuits such as music from your HiFi, PC or television. In fact the latter two sources may sport a lack of bass for which the headphones will provide the perfect counterbalance and not overwhelm the sound as can happen all too easily with music.

Looking at the £50 price tag there'd have to be another special detail to the proceedings and it arrives in the shape of a two-year warranty where the headphones will be replaced at least once dependent on the fault. If you lack the receipt because the HD200s were a gift or bought through a company, then basic service charges start from £17 (quoted 2003) but any further invoiced work would be guaranteed for three months afterwards in the absence of any other warranty. These are the entry level to the Master DJ range so don't bash them if you buy a pair. They can take the odd knock, but not deliberate dropping or throwing. They'd probably perform best in the hands of bedroom DJs up and down the country then or, as I've used them before, perfect for when you need clarity when listening to audio scripts at production level.

Tags: Audio Headsets Sennheiser

Sennheiser Master HD 200 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 13 May 2004 16:28:33 +0100

Iomega has a habit of launching new formats of its own before taking a while to catch up with what’s popular, open-ended and widely used. This is the case with its Super DVD range. However by including DVD-RAM support, Iomega keeps one eye out for the earliest adopters of rewriteable DVD, and can truly claim to be universal unlike the truckload of burners we’ve recently seen only supporting +/-R/W and not the caddy format.

You also need to take the time to sort out your USB cabling but it was good to finally have a USB 2.0 device to test with our Belkin PCI interface card. As you can imagine from the Iomega portable CD-RW we reviewed some time ago, the Super Drive is as portable as the average breeze block but even bricks don’t also need to be plugged into the mains, with a proprietary connector you’ll take ten minutes to install because although you get the pins to line up, you don’t want to force the plug in and risk bending them. Also the depth of the basic burner measures 240mm, but this extends to 370mm (or 14.25in) when you eject a disc, so the drive’s semi-permanent home needs a lot of clearance and swapping around with other items on your desk to fit in.

Once everything’s connected, much like installing a scanner, you load Iomega’s Hotburn software, connect the drive, it detects via USB 2.0 and you’re ready to go. Or rather we should say, if you have any hitches at all you’re directed to uninstall your existing burning software- and then you’re ready to go. This time Iomega’s chief program, Hotburn, is at least self-contained and installed without tray icon programs to slow up the testbed, unlike previous incarnations of its software. That’s not to say the other five utilities won’t leave behind icons you may want to turn off.

The Hotburn interface is intuitive enough for the casual user to guess-click their way around it. In case you feel like it’s doing too much handholding, you can switch back to a more Nero -style look, which copies Windows Explorer anyway. It’s annoying to be given the rounded-up file size figures, but then the program waits until you want to burn to warn you when the file size in Kilobytes breeches the limit. Again it’s up against three years of Nero simplicity when you’d simply look for a bar at the bottom of the screen. Remember this is the basic, enclosed package to let you create discs. The more enhanced features have to be enabled, after you click past the copyright disclaimers and warnings. To be fair, pros would already own a copy of Roxio Creator 7 Suite or Nero 6, patched to support this burner.

Performance ranged from satisfactory to slow, but that was exacerbated by one fact: No enclosed media in the box. Given that the machine supports all three formats, it was a surprise to not even receive the cheapest rewriteable of the three, a DVD+RW now sold in ten packs of £1.50 per disc in PC World’s seasonal offers. The Super Drive’s already a premium product by dint of being portable so another £5-10 on top and a blank in the box would have been good, even if the user may have had to do their own formatting. Let’s not forget we already had the USB 2.0 card as well, otherwise non-laptop users would need to fork out up to £20 more for the PCI board, or suffer USB 1.1 speed, which for DVD burning, we rejected given that CD would slow to 6-speed.

We’ll post further results as we continue testing but the Super Drive followed the usual better known brand=better speed pattern regarding media. As with most DVD Burners, fastest performance on fewest files was the order of the day, so big chunks of video or WAV audio took less time than discs full of non-sequential general data. As it’s there on your desk though, in a home environment, you could burn and carry on working or doing other things without any urgency. Those needing a true road warriors’ drive may prefer the smaller LaCie range as opposed to this workstation add-in.

Tags: Hardware Storage Iomega

Iomega Super DVD Writer USB2 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 04 May 2004 13:50:21 +0100

So many of the headsets we review are sexy, snazzy, offer wireless communication and promise infinite wonders. This headset has the good looks but steadfastly clings to its cable. Even so, that doesn't stop it being one of the best basic sets we've encountered at comparative rock-bottom prices.

First off there's the cable length, rated at 2.5metres but when straightening and measuring it, there's up to 13cm extra wire. That might sound insignificant but when you don't have front mounted 3.5mm jacks the extra travel is useful for head-turning room.

Next, the excellent design. The headphone cans swivel horizontally up to a 90-degree angle. The attached headphones themselves are also loosely fastened and the combination allows them to angle to the shape of any pair of ears. This gives an extremely high level of comfort. Next, the microphone can be similarly rotated on the left cone, and then to talk with the mic on your right hand side, you simply turn the whole headset around.

In tests the microphone performed well. It was certainly powerful enough to pick up the sound of my mono, one-speaker TV in the opposite corner of the room as I was talking on the net, and it performed well in Unreal Tournament 2004. However the lack of a directional mic did cause problems when we tested it on voice recognition packages and its ability to capture ambient noise levels so well could present issues if you worked in a busy environment. That said, this is ideal for the casual internet chat user or gamer alike using it in a spare room or study.

Buy it from Argos and the store will also offers a warranty extension so that if you trip over the wire (which we did twice during testing) and damage either the microphone or headphones, it can be swapped. After going through one of Argos' own headsets in this way, another £3 for the clumsy among us is fair value. If you acquire a retail Nectar voucher into the bargain, then that insurance charge will drop to 50 pence- making it an even better deal.

Tags: Audio Headsets Labtec

Labtec Stereo 332 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 07 Apr 2004 08:51:16 +0100

It began life as X-Isle, a tech demo for showing off Nvidia’s graphics cards but then someone saw the potential for a game among all the dinosaur dodging. Three years later, developer Crytek Studios realises its dream with Far Cry (FC), which delivers everything it promised over its two-year extended development.

It’s no longer a sophisticated Jurassic Park Trespasser variant- sadly for followers since the days of the tech demo, the dinosaurs are gone (though that’s not to say that an aspiring mod-maker won’t bring them back). Now you’re up against your fellow mercenary man and these are basically the meanest and toughest NPCs since the randomly programmed Aliens from AVP/Gold. Like the xenomorphs the Far Cry enemies hunt in packs, take cover and run away when injured for example and one will try to flush you out while the others wade in. These men are as tough as the Germans in the Medal of Honor series, although they have their own catchphrases. The game plays as if Crytek studied every FPS with any major AI improvement and incorporated the best elements of all of them.

See that square jawed gun-toting fellow on the cover art? He’s ex-Marine Jack Carver and it’s your job to guide him through the Jungles of Catubu, eradicating everything in sight in his hunt for Val Cortez, the journalist contact who drew him to the island. Aside from the mysterious Doyle who gives advice via satellite phone it’s just you, the jungle, the baddies, and another group who dislike everyone else- but you meet them later over the course of 20 tough levels. That’s right, a long single-player game, just when you thought it was unfashionable to give the public a title lasting longer than twelve hours.

As well as the best elements of other forerunners, Crytek’s baddies have some tricks all of their own- such as sounding the alarm and returning with backup if you don’t get out your present location. They’ll give chase and of course you may end up meeting the backup force when you’re trying to escape your original attackers and having to shoot it out all over again with the new arrivals. As long as you’re stealthier than you’d expect to be in, say, Unreal Tournament 2004, you’ll be fine. In fact if you wanted to act like Sam Fisher in Ubi Soft’s sister title Splinter Cell, there are times when the game will let you go almost anywhere. However straying too far from the allotted path alerts helicopter gunships, which will “persuade” you to return to the mission location.

The auto-save checkpoints guide your progress through the game. Just like Halo’s checkpoint system, if your health and ammunition aren’t topped up or worse still, a battle’s not over when it saves, you have to backtrack over two checkpoints. Unlike Halo, enemy behaviour won’t be similar with every reload so having to replay at least gives you a different experience. Whether you find it irritating depends of the time of the morning you’ve stayed up to when the bad auto-save moment happens. In our case we haven’t been annoyed yet even at 3am. We were immersed enough to want to finish firefights with some armour for a change (a rare occurrence on Veteran or Realistic, the top two out of five difficulty levels).

Unfortunately it’s a shame the realities of PC Gaming get in the way of such a sublime experience- the crashing to desktop forced the v1.1 patch on the day of UK release and even then that didn’t cure some of the choppy sound effects that also affected the demos and forced tinkering with the sound settings. For the game’s great beauty- (the water from an elevated position is the best Radeon rendering of liquid since Yager, never mind the jungle) - FC tries its best to accommodate legacy PCs. It was a compliment to be told by the auto configuration tool that an Athlon (1.5GHz) XP1800+ with 768Mb PC2100 RAM and a Radeon 9600 was still regarded as midrange, but this is the last year that’s going to happen. Performance was smooth and playable but then we defragmented to keep the 4Gb application in one place on the hard disk. Our midrange PCs smooth-if-slow handling fitted the game’s pace, but the 9800 Pro in our other testbed loved the workout, its P4 2HGz processor rising to the challenge with the extra 500MHz clockspeed.

Far Cry’s engine will take all the computing power you have and demand more. You thought you were upgrading for Half-Life 2 at the end of the year, but FC gives your computer an excellent workout right in time for Easter. Otherwise, if you have PCs like our testbeds, the game shows up the areas where you need to upgrade. We’re hoping the patches don’t get any larger than 27Mb at a time so as not to inflate the 4Gb basic install size any further from the DVD installation- which will be slow if your DVD-ROM drive spins beneath the now-standard 16-speed. Far Cry replaces Quake III: Team Arena as the demanding workhorse that threatens to make PCs from two years ago redundant without an upgrade. It’s also the first game among the other 3D shooters released this month to really showcase the Athlon 64’s capabilities.

Tags: Gaming PC games FPS Ubisoft

Far Cry - PC originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Sat, 27 Mar 2004 10:23:56 +0000

If this looks familiar it's because of heavy TV promotion by its seller, Comet. Its £30 RRP is standard, not just for seasonal sales. When we saw the advertisement, an effective MP3 player for the price of three chart CDs we doubted it was true, so we bought one. The DM1945 is actually a sell-up product from Comet, because Proline makes the CD Player alone for £12. The minimal packaging shows the mains adaptor, which will turn the unit into its own battery charger for two rechargeables.

The second surprise after the price is the fact that the supplied in-ear headphones are quite reasonable rather than the rubbish you'd expect. They are above-average quality, although can be improved upon by Sennheiser's MX500 in ear set costing £20. We used Galaxy Headphones costing £10 from Argos with an in-line volume control, which use the neckband system originated by Sony, and a selection of music from originals, to CDs burnt with radio broadcasts and MP3s to test. When listening at home we also used Hi-Tex BHP-11. These cheaper headsets were still better than the supplied in-ear models, but using £30 cans from Beyerdynamic and Audio-Technica would be the best trade-off for better quality without driving the batteries too hard.

Volume defaults to 21 when playing a new CD and can be increased to a maximum of 32. When the music has been produced in the last eight years on CD, the peak volume is too loud and we defaulted to 30. For MP3s, the music is loud enough at an encoding rate of 160kbps but the traffic was still audible when walking. For 128k encoding, preset modes according to Rock, Pop, Classical and other settings can add the bass that lower-bitrate MP3s sometimes lack. That's as long as the extra bass switch doesn't swamp the music. It's also useful that controls need a double tap so carrying the player in your pocket won't accidentally switch it off. If you want to be sure, there's the customary Hold button.

The unit boasts 40-second antishock, but fails to make clear that it takes four seconds short of that for the memory buffer to reach maximum protection. During that time it's quite easy for the unit to skip, and you have to physically hold the player and wait for the buffer to fill. 100 seconds antishock for MP3 Playback is much more impressive and practically executed, leading to a lot less skipping on test.

Taking the unadulterated “normal” source without adding bass, we employed two Marantz Hi-Fi Separates, the purely analogue CD46 and CD67OSE with digital out for MD recording, listening only through their headphone sockets with the same headphones, and the same music, to provide a pure and more refined but bassy reference.

The performance results are posted in our forums in an unedited format at the following address: http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=580#580 . This allows us to pick out the highlights when testing the player against Hi Fi separates in an attempt to gauge whether a £30 portable can compete with equipment costing five times as much.

The only time the DM1945 gave us a disappointing performance was with the Guitar heavy electronic piece Ralome by Plaid. It was slightly sibilant at the start, the bass was too forward and aggressive, unsubtle for the chilled-out strings. The problem abated at lower volumes and depending on surroundings may be less of an issue but that was the sole lowlight. However the rest of the time, this £30 player had less bass all round but as much clout as a Hi-Fi separate powerful enough to supply bass without amplification through its headphone socket.

With the Fight Club electronic dance film soundtrack, the portable caused another upset and sounded better than both separates, as it did with parts of the orchestral Entrapment score. Again it was a balance though, as the unit's volume needed reducing on later parts of Entrapment to make the horns sound as good as other instruments and the Fight Club drum tracks' top end wasn't always rimshot-sharp.

Towards the end of testing when we returned to dance music once more, we found that BT's Mercury and Solcace and the Future Shock remix of Moby's Porcelain were the only two pieces of music to be improved by changing the EQ presets from Normal. For Moby, the sibilance surrounding the filtered Bassline was removed. Extra bass was all BT needed and it didn't swamp the song. MP3 playback from a skip management point of view was excellent as the buffer was consistently emptied and refilled and the laser was making such miniscule movements that the unit skipped a lot less than for CD Testing. It has none of the folder management features of smaller and sexier MP3 units, but as an added extra it makes the player all the more attractive.

Sound quality wasn't in doubt, but the playback of CDs at a ninety-degree angle or even upside down which will merely cost you battery power on a Sony G-Protected Discman, will make music skip on the Proline, and rather than always recovering automatically, sometimes you have to pause and unpause where the unit stopped to save battery power. The DM1945 MP3's happiest at the bottom of a bag, but still flat, especially when carried in a rucksack.

Tags: Audio CDs Comet

Proline DM1945MP3 portable CD/MP3 player originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 17 Feb 2004 11:44:11 +0000