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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Hayden who wrote (4109)	11/15/1998 6:24:00 PM
From: Rocky Reid	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10072

>>How about a 250 MByte Zip Player replacing the venerable audio tape?<< With a magnetic disc drive, you run the risk of a head crash (the read/write head slamming into the disc) during normal portable use. No such risk is involved with CD, as it uses a laser to read info. And audio cassette is a tape media where THE READ/WRITE HEAD IS ALREADY IN CONTACT WITH THE MEDIA. Therefore, no risk of a head crash with audio tape during use. Not to mention that the quality of the Zip250 audio would be worse than CD. A Zip-based audio machine would have to use data compression to handle as many minutes of audio as CD can. CD's hold 650MB. Zip250 holds less than 40% of this. And forget about any record companies distributing albums on Zip. WAY too expensive. A CD costs about 10¢ to stamp. An audio cassette costs about 25¢.

To: Jeff Hayden who wrote (4109)	11/15/1998 11:01:00 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 10072

Jeff - Re: the Zip 250 audio player It might work just fine. The heads of a Zip drive are kept away from the media by a little low-friction pad, which always maintains perfect spacing, so head crashes are not a problem. By using MP3 compression, you could get MORE than a whole CD on one Zip 250 disk, with excellent sound quality. As someone else said, it would sure beat tape. Pop your CD into your CD-ROM drive, copy just the tunes you want to the Zip disk in MP3 format, slip the disk into the Zipster portable, and away you go. On the other hand, I like my Sony MiniDisc player just fine. I get excellent recording quality with the newest version of the home deck, and the player is wonderfully small and light, with excellent battery life. MiniDiscs only hold 128MB of data, by the way. And of course, the recorders and players are more expensive to build than Zip drives. I wonder if there might not be a market for the Zipster after all. - Allen