Mike Reed, vice president of marketing for S3's Rio division. However, digital music makers are hoping to capture a wider mass market with these new devices. Their goal is to have them overtake devices like cassette and CD players as the standard for listening to music on the go. The new MP3 devices are compact and thus more convenient to carry around than cassette and CD players.
Most listeners also say that the sound is comparable to that of a typical stereo.
They have completely skip-proof music playback, and the user is free to put any combination of songs on them. For now, though, their drawbacks include the fact that players must still depend almost exclusively on personal computers as a way to download digital music. They are still also more expensive, and they do not hold as much music as their older competitors. Audio-player designers are also trying to improve the sound quality and volume of these devices. Answers will vary.