Digital Trends

Mpio FY200 256MB March 15th, 2004 | by

Sound Quality and Testing

You are probably wondering at this point how this player sounds. The answer is just like every other MPIO product we have tested to date, and this is a good thing for the most part. The standard neck headphones that Digitalway packs with the FY200 are of relatively high quality. The highs and mids are very crisp and clear, however, the bass seems to be very lacking. Despite having 6 preset equalizer settings and one user customizable setting, we were unable to find anything to satisfy our bass cravings. There is a noticeable difference between the equalizer settings, but to be honest they feel more like sound enhancements to the normal setting than a different equalizer setting altogether. But overall, the sound quality is slightly better than your typical MP3 player probably due more to the higher quality headphones packaged with the FY200 than the player itself.

We tested the player with several other headphones, of known better all-around quality, and the bass was still not powerful enough. Sometimes lack of bass performance is only the fault of the headphones, but in this case, the FY200 unit itself was the main culprit.

The FY200 gives you a lot of options when it comes to playing your music. You can set it to play through all of the music folders if you have your music categorized by albums, or you can set it to only repeat a specific folder. We thought this was very cool, however you cannot set the player to randomly play all songs in every folder, it is limited to only one folder. 

You can also speed up or slow down the speed of the playback of the song, although we are unsure of why you would want to do that unless it comes in handy on voice recordings. Overall the FY200 would be a good player for listening to rock or other music with little emphasis on bass. Techno music sounds average and hip hop and rap is on the poor side due to the missing bass.

One of the best features of the FY200 is the integrated FM tuner. Why more players don't incorporate this is beyond us — we always end up using the FM tuner. Reception is very good and you can bookmark your favorite stations to listen to at a later time. If you should choose to, you can record the song being played over the FM tuner as well and save it for playback later. You can store up to 20 station channels on the player, probably more than you would ever need, but it is always better to have more than less.