Waxing Lyra-cal (Thomson Lyra)

Member Name: JPShooter

Product:	Thomson Lyra
Date:	04/06/01 (259 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good memory size, Graphic equalizer, Small and light

Disadvantages: Data transfer could be faster, No sign of more Flash cards

I had been considering the purchase of an mp3 player for quite some time, so I wanted the choice I made to be a good one. All in all, I can say that I wasn't disappointed with Thomson's Lyra player. After all, £170 is a lot of money when you're a student, but fortunately I managed to get the price down to £155!

The player came with all the usual features you would expect - pause, previous track, next track, as well as skipping forward and backwards during a track. It also came with a good graphic equalizer, with a few presets (such as rock, jazz or bass), which I was pleased with for such a small player. The player is quite small when compared with a CD player or even a cassette player, and even with batteries it is reasonably light. The headphones supplied were a bit of a disappointment, being the over-the-head type, but I had looked in the box before I had bought it, so it didn't put me off. However, they do give better sound quality than in-earphones, which I prefer as they're more discreet. The display on the player is good in comparison to others on the market, about as big as your average mobile phone screen. This gives it the right amount of space to know each of the tracks on the list it displays when it's not playing anything. A clever function is the idea of placing track names on the screen, rather than artist names. I can't imagine you'd find which track you'd want if you put the whole Manic Street Preachers album on there if it displayed artist names first.

When a track is played, the artist and track name are placed on seperate lines, useful but not essential. The graphic equalizer is easy to set once you get the hang of it, but I usually stick to the presets provided, which are good, but the lack of bass is sometimes shown by the earphones. The sound quality is unrivalled - you can't say anything against it. The volume control is placed on the side of the player, separate to everyt
hing else, which makes it easy to alter if it is in a pocket or bag. The screen also has a very useful light, which stays on whilst you're pressing buttons, and then turns off when you've finished.

The batteries supplied last for around 20 hours, which matches what is said in the blurb on the inside cover. This would make one set of batteries fine for a long train journey (and back) or even a flight. In my experience of listening walking to and from lectures (about 25 mins a day, 5 days a week at the least), they lasted about a month. It also has an option to plug in an external supply from the mains, but if you needed to do that it would kind of defeat the object of it being portable.

The memory card supplied is 64MB, which equates to about 18 tracks, or just over an hour at 128kb per second mp3's. The can be compressed to decrease the quality so more tracks can be put on, but one hour is only what you would get from one CD anyway. I was told more memory cards would be available soon, but none have yet appeared. However, mp3's are the future of music, and it will only be a matter of time before more memory cards appear and the price of them drops.

I was apprehensive about the process of transferring files from my machine to the player to say the least. The supplied software is Real Jukebox 8, not an astounding choice, but one that in the end, does the job. I deal only with mp3's, but the player can also deal with wma I believe. Once a "playlist" has been created by the Jukebox (which I made my entire collection), it is fairly easy to transfer files from the machine to the player. However, I did encounter a few problems with the Jukebox software, when I had selected all the tracks that would fill the memory card, I clicked on "Transfer", and I got the "illegal operation" message and my carefully-selected song list was down the drain. As this appeared to happen repeatedly, I now
only transfer three songs at a time, which isn't too bad. I had no problems with transferring files that I downloaded from the WWW or ones that I had ripped from CD's myself.

The actual transfer is done via the parallel port at the back of your PC, which has an adapter which allows you to plug in the device (which may have been there before) at the same time. It also requires a plug into the keyboard port (and again supplies an adapter top have the keyboard in at the same time), for some bizarre reason. It takes less than 2 minutes to transfer one track from my PC to the player, bearing in mind that I have a fast PC. This is acceptable, but there is a unit available that allows transfer by USB, but I don't think I'll bother as it normally takes 30 minutes to do the entire memory card, which is fine by me. The unit which the Flash memory card is plugged into normally sits at the back of my desk, as there is no reason not to keep it plugged in all the time. The main thing is, once a lot of the setup is done, it will not need to be done again. The instructions were useful enough to allow me to set the whole thing up in less than an hour, without calling on my Computer Science degree knowledge! However, whenever I turn on my PC now, after it has finished loading Windows, there is a rather alarming internal-speaker noise that lets me know the adapter is still connected. Thanks.

Overall, the player is as good as you will find for £170, although it can be bought for as little as £140 on the WWW now I believe. The functions of the player are very good, without being excessive or as bulky. If you are looking for a good mp3 player without jumping to the price level of the Creative Labs player, then I would reccomend it. As always to judge whether or not it was a good purchase, I ask myself if I were to go back in time, would I buy it again? Yes, most definetely.

Summary: