Print this article

Samsung YP-MT6Z


Date
: 04/18/05 – 03:49:48 PM

Author
:

Category
: MP3 Players

Page 1 : Introduction

Manufacturer
: Samsung

Price
: N/A

These past few months, Samsung has become a rather popular name around Overclockers Online. We've taken a look at a number of their Laser Printers and their popular line of LCD Monitors. However, I'm the first to present a review on the
Samsung YP-MT6Z
at Overclockers Online. This little MP3 player is packed with a ton of features; perhaps a rival against the iPOD Shuffle?

Let's not waste any more time as we dive right into this review.

Page 2 : Package

Samsung shipped their YP-MT6Z in its retail packaging and it arrived in perfect shape. There are a number of distinct features on the packaging to inform you, the buyer, what you will be purchasing.

Clearly visible are the big bold characters ’1 GB’ and the actual MP3 player. When I was first asked to review the MP3 player, the attached image in my email made me think the YP-MT6Z was going to be a lot bigger. It's nice to see how small the unit really is.

Tucked away in the very far corner is a little something for Samsung publicity.

If you really plan on keeping the packaging, you'll know exactly where you spent those hundred bucks!

To the left of the MP3 player is a picture of it in operation and below that is a little Windows logo claiming that its audio ‘plays for sure’.

If you look further down, you get the first key piece of technical information. In a very light shade, Samsung claims that the MP3 player is USB 2.0. The font color is so light that if you were reading the 1.0 GB tidbit of information, you could completely miss this one.

Let's flip over to the back and see what is waiting over there.

Nothing really seems to stick out, we get another picture of the MP3 Player and some more specifications.

This about covers the outside of the packaging, it sure took a while to get through all of it.

Actually opening the package is not an easy task. The seal on the plastic shell is firm and right against the side of the box. There was only one way to open this box – pull out the scissors.

Once I got the package opened, I carefully took out the contents. Samsung packaged its MP3 player in a separate injection molded case so it can be removed separately and more carefully.

Less worrisome was the paperwork included. This was all stashed away behind the back cover.

Included with the MP3 player were a standard AA battery, a necktie and a plastic cover to shield dirt from your MP3 Player. The plastic cover is located in the middle of the top row. Samsung also provided a 3.5 mm male-male line-in cord and a pair of headphones. What was most interesting to me was the USB package. Samsung provides you with a little converter that you plug into the YP-MT6Z and into your standard USB port. A brilliant idea if you ask me since I can have one extension cord for my CF reader, my USB pen drive and now with this adapter I can easily transfer songs without having to pull out a proprietary USB cord. The not so brilliant idea was including a 6' USB cord with the Samsung proprietary head attached. A standard USB extension cord would have been more useful and cheaper to provide!

By now you are probably itching to get some more pictures of the actual MP3 player. With that said, it's time we move onto the body!

Page 3 : Body

To start things off, here is a picture of the plain body.

The body is composed of three main parts. You have the LCD, a plastic enclosure and two metal side panels. The top face, seen above, with the LCD panel and the mini-joystick controller rests on a white plastic top.

If you rotate the body once, the metallic surface with the stop/play, pause and record button is visible.

Another rotation reveals the underside of the MP3 player. Other than some product details, there isn't much here.

One final rotation takes us to the last side panel.

Visible are some words saying ‘Digital Audio Player’, the battery location, but more importantly the ‘HOLD’ feature. By sliding the switch to the right, the player is on hold and buttons are inactive. This is also visible by the red spot underneath the slide.

If we stand the player upright, the battery slot, necktie and headset jack are visible.

If you press down on the battery slot and gently slide it, it opens up the battery cage with room for one AA.

The manual, and various other printed spots, claim the player will go for 42 hrs on one AA.

On the underside of the battery slot are the USB connection and the ENC (encoder) jack.

Page 4 : Specifications

Here are the specifications from Samsung Canada:

Here's a little quote from Samsung about the YP-MT6Z:

Page 5 : Features

Apart from the most obvious capabilities of an MP3 player, Samsung has bundled several other features with the YP-MT6Z.

First and foremost, the YP-MT6Z acts as a removable storage device. With a capacity of 1 GB, you can use it to move files around during LAN parties, or even take important documents to school or work with you. All you need to do is plug in the player and copy and paste via Windows Explorer.

In addition, the YP-MT6Z is capable of directly converting your favourite CDs and cassettes into MP3 formats by using the line-in cable. All you do is connect the two devices together, use the line-in cord and the ENC jack, and record. You are able to adjust the bitrate from 32 Kbps to 128 Kbps and vary the volume to the level you prefer.

A feature becoming more and more common on MP3 players is a FM receiver. I was able to get FM stations ranging from 87.5 MHz to 108.0 MHz. There are also five equalizer presets that you can quickly switch between. You are also able to record songs off your favourite radio station if you already don't have a copy stored in the 1GB memory.

If you're one of those people that like to record lectures or take logs of what you like to do, the MT6Z comes equipped with its own voice recorder.

The last feature to cover isn't what's in the MP3 player, but something Samsung bundled with it. Similar to Apple, Samsung has it's own music studio where you can play songs and even buy songs. The Samsung Music Studio is very similar to WMP or WinAMP. Some of the features included in the Music Studio are music playing, album creation and format conversions.

Page 6 : Installation & Testing

Installation is very simple. If you have a Pentium 200 MHz processor with at least Windows 98SE, 40 MB of storage space, a CD-ROM, USB and a graphics card, you're set! The first thing to do is install the software.

I first went with the driver and then the Music Studio.

The next step is to plug in the MP3 player. After pondering over this, I still think a male-to-female USB extension cord and the provided adapter is a better combo than providing the adapter and a USB cord with the adapter fixed on. I'm sure Samsung had a reason that I'm overlooking. Anyways, once you have the YP-MT6Z plugged in, it should pop right up in Windows Explorer. Here are the properties I got…

I moved 991.5 MB of MP3's over in less than 9 minutes. This works out to 1.836 MB/second. Not all that fast, but this transfer is based on many files. We'll proceed to more testing in a few paragraphs. But first we'll start with the audio testing.

Page 7 : Audio Tests

Any problems experienced during my audio evaluation can be traced to one of three problems: low quality MP3, low quality headphones or flaws in the MP3 Player. The focus of this section is to get a feel for how the MP3's are played using the stock headphones. By changing the headphones, you will notice a difference in the quality.

The provided headphones were an easy fit into my ears and they stayed in without any problems. When I cranked up the volume (setting of 30), I could clearly hear every word of Usher's ‘Burn’ while it was resting on the table and I was typing away at my keyboard. At the lowest setting, 0, it was as if nothing was playing. The lowest audible level is one, and at this setting the song is audible if you're in a quiet room by yourself doing your own work. As I type this setting on my computer with all the fans on I'm still able to make out the words to a song.

To test out some of the acoustics, I played a variety of songs and commented on its performance. This is a qualitative evaluation and your peronsal preference may differ compared to mine. I'm going to play all the songs at a music level of 10 out of 30 and will use the default settings.

Genre
: R&B

Artist
: Usher

Album
: Confessions

Song
: Burn
203kbit (VBR), 8881 frames
44100Hz Joint Stereo

After listening to this song a few times, the vocals were very clear and there was no distortion when multiple voices were present. I was able to point out where the voices were coming from and despite only having two speakers, the sound was clean and clear. Unless you start bringing up the volume, which I recommend for some songs, the bass may seem a little hollow. The problem would be a flaw in the headphones provided by Samsung. When I plugged in my iPod headphones, it sounded a little better. Nothing would beat a real subwoofer in terms of getting the right bass.

I decided to take a song that has a little more treble; I sifted through the random dump of MP3's I threw on and found one by Maroon 5.

Genre
: Alternative Pop/Rock

Artist
: Maroon 5

Album
: Songs About Jane

Song
: She Will Be Loved
128kbit, 9894 frames
44100Hz Joint Stereo

This song is a lot lighter with a lot less bass and much more melody. Although Adam Levine's voice doesn't hit any extremely high notes, the ear buds didn't have any problem keeping up with the vocals.

If you want to tweak the equalizer to suit your tastes, press and hold the ‘M’ button to load up the menu. Scroll to setting and advance forward to the ‘My Sound’ section. There are 8 preset settings you can load: SRS, TruBass, Normal, Classic, Jazz, Rock, and User. In addition to these preset EQs, you can select bass booster. The two other settings you can change is the WOW set, where you can mess around and customize your own SRS, TruBass, Focus and Optimum and User EQ set. You can also change a variety of other features; refer to the manual for details on this.

The one thing I noticed during fiddling with the setting is that you don't get to hear the music you're playing change. Instead, the music stops and every time you change something you hear a series of beeps indicating that a change has been made. It would of been nice if you could change the settings while songs are being played.

The last relevant topic that needs to be covered is battery strength. Without a doubt, this MP3 player has a long battery duration, especially when comparing to my original Creative Muvu and Ultra Products MP3 player. At one point I left the MP3 player running all weekend, by accident, and from Saturday afternoon to early Monday morning it worked without a problem. It wasn't until Monday when I was heading to school did the last song die due to a dead battery. I estimate that the MP3 player was playing for 35-40 hrs, perfectly reasonable for the player to cycle all 900 songs on it.

Page 8 : File Transfer Benchmarks

To test out the performance of the YP-MT6Z, I will be using three pieces of software: Sisoft SANDRA 2005, HD Tach 3.0 and HD Tune 2.1.

The tests were conducted on my desktop machine. The environment I tested it in resembles a typical workstation. In the real world application, you won't be formatting and defragging your system every time you want to copy a 10 MB file over.

Flash Memory:

Sisoft File System Benchmark

Sisoft Removable Storage

HD Tach

HD Tune

On the whole, the Samsung YP-MT6Z performed just as I expected. The YP-MT6Z is definitely not a replacement for something like the Corsair Flash Voyager or the VisionTek Xtreme 2 Go Drive. However, the mediocore performance is more than ample for those looking to use the MT6Z as a simple tool to move some small documents between work and home.

To show off some real world application of the YP-MT6Z in terms of file transfer performance, I moved files back and forth and recorded the time. To time the process, I used the timer on my Roots watch. Error can be traced back to how quickly I hit the start and stop button on my watch.

4 Files totaling 968MB: 348 seconds or 2.7816 MB/Second

A lot of the file transfer speed has to do with how many files you are actually moving around. For instance, take a look at this next example:

2808 Files totaling 852 MB: 26 minutes 3 seconds or 0.54510 MB/Second.

This makes it far more obvious that the YP-MT6Z is designed to move either songs which are a few MBs in size, large files like movies or a few small documents – nothing in the range of 2000+ files.

Page 9 : Conclusion

After using the MP3 player for a month, I don't have too many things to complain about. The experience was a fun and entertaining one. One of my favourite features has to be the FM tuner; the one feature I think is lacking on my iPod. In regards to performance and features, the YP-MT6Z has it all. There isn't much this puppy can't do, it has 1 GB of storage space for all your MP3 and file transfer needs, voice recording and MP3 recording. If you're looking for a rechargeable system, you'll need to invest in some rechargeable AA batteries, however the 42 hr AA battery life is not bad compared to the power hungry AAA systems.

With the increasing trend for the public to wear MP3 Players around their neck as a fashion statement, it's safe to say that Samsung will be a popular choice among the young crowd for their portable audio needs. Their sleek and simple yet feature-full product shows that what's small can still pack a heavy punch.

Advantages

1 GB memory
Small and lightweight
Multiple Features: MP3 Player, File Storage, FM Radio, Recorder, Encoder

Disadvantages

Non-rechargable battery
Slow file transfer

Overclockers Online would like to thank Samsung for their continued support!