It’s a Creative Zen Stone that I got as a Christmas gift in 2008. I just found it in a drawer, and it’s still holding charge. The last thing I put on it was The Life And Times Of Scrooge by Tuomas Holopainen, in 2015 – I don’t know why, at that time I definitely had a smartphone.
It has a headphone jack, which immediately makes it better than every smartphone produced in the last several years, and it can easily drive my 80-ohm Beyerdynamic. The audio quality is as good as one can expect. The only drawback is that it only holds 1GB… my old CD rips had to be compressed to hell and back.
Let me reiterate that this has been sitting untouched for a decade and was immediately ready for action. No login, no annoying software updates, expired subscription, or remote bricking by the manufacturer. Eat my shorts, Spotify Car Thing.
P.s. A Lifetime Of Adventure is a banger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWwSVOo5K_k
I’d like some ear protection headphones that can play opus files from SSD.
It would also be cool if they had a microphone to work as a headset and a radio and walkie talkie function build in. Now that I think about it, it would also be cool if they’d also pick up speech and filter it from the ambient noise so I can listen to people yelling at me while still being protected from ambient noise. Maybe it could also work as a hearing aid that gives you super human hearing? Obviously it should have HRTF virtual surround sound and orientation tracking. Wait, it should be integrated into a bicycle helmet. Adding some eye protection would be nice too, and breathing mask that just clips on. And a head-up display for 1-2 lines of text to read eBooks while we’re at it.