Digital Trends

MSI Mega Player 516

October 28th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use Cont'd

The FM tuner works great and we were able to pick our local stations in stereo sound without a lot of interference. You can also decide to record what you are listening to over FM radio and save it for playback later. The internal microphone works very well, but because the external microphone also uses a mini jack, you will be hard pressed to find a compatible microphone. We were told by MSI product marketing that the system uses the mini jack instead of the regular headphone/microphone jack because the 516BT version of this player uses a Bluetooth headphone with built in microphone and needs those types of inputs. So they basically left these inputs on the non-Bluetooth Mega 516 version as well.

Menu navigation is consistent with other MSI digital audio players, but poses a somewhat steep learning curve for those switching from another brand of audio player. You have to exit out of each sub menu rather than being able to exit out of the whole menu using one button. There are 5 different equalizer settings to choose from: Classical, Jazz, Pop, Rock and Normal. Each setting changes the way the music sounds by increasing the treble and bass to levels representative of the settings genre. The pop setting deepens the bass while the rock setting flattens all sound levels for example. But no matter what the settings are, the headphones that come with the Mega 516 simply sound terrible. Battery life on the player was above average during our testing requiring a recharge after about 12 hours of continuous usage.

Conclusion

MSI has done two things wrong with the Mega 516. First they packaged some very cheap wrap-around style headphones with a fantastic audio player. And secondly they decided to use the smaller mini-jack headphone input. What this means is that people will have a very difficult time finding aftermarket headphones that will be compatible with this player — if at all.

The Mega 516 itself is a wonderful audio player and there are so many things right with it that it is just a shame to see a couple things holding it back. The integrated lithium-ion battery and OLED display make the Mega 516 a very unique player to begin with. Add to that expansion capabilities via the MMC/SD media card slot and you have a player that should stand out in a very crowded market.

What we would recommend to the MSI product design team is to use the standard headphone jack on this player, include a better set of ear buds, add USB 2.0 support and maybe support for Ogg Vorbis and AAC audio formats. MSI is definitely on the right track and we are excited to see what they come up with next. We think it would be safe for MSI to charge a little more for this player if that meant we could get better headphones. Priced at under $150 dollars, the Mega 516 is a great value for the non-audiophile user.