Performance and Quality

Getting Ready

Since Creative Labs wants the Nomad Jukebox to house your entire music collection, your MP3 files are treated as a library on the Nomad Jukebox. From this library, you can build and save playlists to your own liking. The metaphor seems sound, but it doesn't work very well in practice.

How do I browse by title

You can search for individual songs by using the keypad in an "arcade high-score" like fashion, or browse by the Album Name. In addition, you can filter the album names by artist or genre, but there is no way to see all the track titles, or all the titles from a particular genre, or artist in a single list. I went through the albums and enqueued every single MP3 I had. I pressed play and then the Jukebox crashed. Two tries later, I decided that my multitude of MP3s was causing the Jukebox to crash and instead I start adding MP3s to my playlist incrementally. It turns out that the Nomad Jukebox is just very slow, and the unit had not actually crashed. In general, the button response does not seem as snappy as other MP3 players and so navigating through these menus to create your playlist can be somewhat of a chore.

Playback

After loading the playlist, the Nomad Jukebox will either display the current position in the playlist, or a detailed track view with the artist, genre, and album information. At first the spartan display without VU meters or animation does not seem like much of a problem, but it is. The Nomad Jukebox does not scroll song titles in either view - it just truncates them. What is particularly aggravating is that the Nomad Jukebox's database actually stores the complete song name; you just cannot read it. I hope your MP3s aren't in the "Artist - Album - Tracktitle.mp3" format.

Audio Quality

The Nomad Jukebox's saving grace is its superb audio quality. Perhaps it's the high quality DAC or good op-amps, but the Nomad Jukebox does an excellent job of playing back MP3s. There is minimal hiss and a healthy bass response through the headphone jack. In addition to a pristine headphone output, you have an option of using different headphone expanders to simulate a wider soundstage and prevent the feeling of music coming from in-between your ears.

Small sample of text

EAX reverb and parametric Equalization is also available. While I am not a big fan of adding reverb to my music, the Nomad Jukebox's implementation seems a bit more refined and subdued than the Sound Blaster Live's. Since EAX is a surround-sound format, Creative Labs offers dual line-outs. This allows you to hook up a 4 speaker system such as a the Klipsch ProMedia 4.1 for 4-speaker EAX sound. Enabling the parametric equalizer drops the volume slightly, but there is no added hiss. For MP3s and WAVs, it's also possible to speed up or slow down the playback.

The EAX menu

Choose your spatialization

The Nomad Jukebox's audio quality is among the best in portable consumer music equipment. You will definitely find it more mellifluous than any laptop or regular sound card, even the Game Theater XP.