Radios I Have Known

The Sansa Clip media player with FM radio

Sansa Clip player as FM radio

It seems that radios are now purchased as a feature, almost as an afterthought, to some other device. Most often you'll find an FM tuner built into a media player, sometimes with recording capabilities, too. Sansa makes a whole family of media players that I've enjoyed using the last several months. They all include an FM tuner that's surprisingly good. You're not likely to do long-distance reception with them, but they work well on local signals. There's no front-end overload. There seem to be relatively few digitally induced noises. And some of them are tiny. This one is the Sansa Clip.

The Sansa Clip+ looks very similar and performs similarly. The Fuze is bigger but also has good (though not exceptional) performance. I chose these players originally because they support two excellent open-source audio encoding formats: FLAC and Ogg Vorbis. I use Linux to manage my music collection; Linux has many tools that support these formats. Moreover, FLAC and Ogg Vorbis use the same metadata format (with the album, artist, and track information), which makes conversion between them easy.

The Clip players seem to have very long battery lives; the Fuze, with its bigger, more colorful display, consumes more power. The FM recording capability, sadly, is limited. It only records uncompressed WAV files, which can consume space (maximum size 8 GB) very quickly. It samples at sub-CD quality levels. Even on the typically overprocessed FM signal of today, there is a noticeable adverse effect caused by undersampling (24 kHz rather than 44.1 kHz). At best, the FM capability is a nice add-on. But as far as live reception goes, it appears that Sansa didn't treat it as an afterthought. They very easily could have done that.

Posted May 6, 2010