Radios I Have Known

Meizu M8 media player with FM radio

Meizu M8 MP3 player as FM radio

This radio is part of an audio and (limited) video) player, the Meizu M8 MiniPlayer. I got it nearly four years ago; at the time it offered what was then a whopping 8 GB of flash memory. I had always wanted a media player, but the use of hard disks in them put me off. So did the fact that many of them don't support the open-source FLAC or Ogg Vorbis formats. The Meizu appeared attractive because it was all flash memory, and because it supported FLAC and Ogg Vorbis as well as MP3s.

It also has an FM radio in it. It can also record from the radio, in 128-bit (or lower) MP3 with 44.1 kHz sampling.

So that's some of the good news. The bad news is that the FM radio picks up a lot of the noises generated by the unit. In other words, it suffers from self-generated noises. This tendency reduces its sensitivity. It is free from front-end overload, so I suspect it is an early-generation DSP radio. The signal strength display is inaccurate. The MONO/STEREO indicator seems to be random. For example, the indicator will say MONO but you'll be able to pick up a station's stereo signal just fine.

The Meizu FM radio seems to be something of an afterthought. The FM radios in the Sansa Fuze and the Sansa Clip players are superior to the one in the Meizu. But they offer recording at a lower quality. So I still have a use for the Meizu. I use it to record local broadcasts in MP3 format. That's OK considering the mediocre quality of most FM stations' audio (for example, KFOG in San Francisco absolutely screeeeeches. In the 12 years I have lived in the Bay Area, KFOG sounded good for maybe one year. I guess the people who work there have bad hearing, even worse than mine).

A nice feature of the Meizu is that you can upload a text file to it, containing information on FM presets and a short piece of text identifying the station. You can see it in the picture above, where I've associated the text "KALW" with the preset at 91.7 MHz.

After four years, the sealed rechargeable battery in the Meizu is beginning to act up. It's losing its ability to hold a charge and, in use, it runs down faster than it once did. I'm wondering how much longer I'll be able to get it to work. So I don't take it with me on my travels any more, but it still works well for local stations, and for the 800+ tunes that I have uploaded to it.

Posted February 22, 2011