Digital Trends

Samsung Yepp YP-55V September 2nd, 2003 | by Howard Chui

Sounds, Software

No matter what you're musical tastes are the YP55V does a fairly good job catering to you. If you like very neutral sounding music you can just leave all the special effects and EQ settings alone.

If you prefer to process your music to death there are a lot of presets, special effects like SRS and Trubass and user settings. With the included headphones the YP55 is capable of producing incredible levels of volume with no distortion until you reach about level 27/30.

Like most newer USB devices the YP55V is a Mass Storage class device which means you don't need a special driver to connect it to Windows XP, ME, MAC OS 9 or higher or Linux 2.4 kernel computers. This also means you don't have to install Music Match or any other music program. I tested the YP55 with Windows XP. When I plug the YP55V into a USB port Windows automatically detects it and within seconds I can copy music files to it using Windows Explorer.

The YP55V was able to copy a 15MB file in about 20 seconds which is pretty fast. Given the size of the YP55V it would have been nice if the USB connector was built right into the player instead of having to lug a USB connector around. I'm happy to report that when connected to a computer the YP55V draws power from the USB port so it doesn't matter if you're low on batteries or not. Also included is some CD ripping software which is simple to use but proprietary to the player.

Conclusion

The YP55V is certainly one of the most fully featured MP3 players on the market. In fact an MP3 player is a poor way to describe the YP55V since it is also able to record from 3 different sources. Certainly I can't think of any other features besides expandable memory to add to the YP55V without having to reclassify it.