Digital Trends

MSI Megastick 1

April 11th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Audio Quality and Voice Recording

For our listening tests we used music from several genres. Paul Oakenfold's Great wall is a techno based album, while Acoustic Alchemy's Against the Grain features acoustic guitar. The Megastick player has five different equalizer settings. They are: normal, jazz, pop, rock and classical.

One good thing about this player is that the highs are relatively crisp and clean. However, like the MPIO FY200 MP3 player, the bass really needs some help. Because the Megastick player can output 30mW per channel you should be able to add better ear buds for use with this player and that should help with the audio quality. The headphones that MSI include with the player only have a spec of 20mW per channel so there is definitely room for better headphones.

Paul Oakenfolds Great Wall is a very solid techno album. It features high quality recordings and has a wide spectrum of musical styles. Some songs are purely instrumental electronics while other songs feature vocals from artists like Led Zeppelin, Madonna and Bjork. The overall sound quality when playing music of this genre is, in our opinion, below average. The highs sound crisp, but very dry and flat while the bass bottomed out relatively quickly.

Acoustic Alchemy's Against the Grain is a great album to test players like this with because of the rich tones of their acoustic guitars. Good speakers will add certain deepness to the pluck of the guitar strings. Overall the Megastick ear buds did an adequate job of reproducing this album. A lot of the depth and bass was missing but we did not have abnormally high expectations for a digital audio player priced under $100.

All of the above testing was done using the ear buds on the 128MB version. We want to warn you that the wrap-around headphones on the 256MB version of this MP3 player are just horrible. The sound quality is very muddy and you have to crank the volume up to well above normal just to get a good listening level. If you buy the 256MB version of this player, do yourself a favor and get a nice set of ear buds to use with it.

Voice recording on this player is very easy to use. There is an external microphone jack for you to use and you can still keep your ear buds plugged into their regular jack. We found this more appealing than swapping out your ear buds to use an external microphone like the MPIO FY200 does. This way you do not have to keep swapping between the two to listen to your recording. The overall quality of the recordings seemed to be very good and microphone sensitivity on the internal mic worked from reasonable distances. You should be able to record a lecture in class from a few rows back. Anything further away would require a better external microphone.