I'm not really one for nostalgia – not only is it misguided, it's pointless too. (Also, it's not as good as it used to be.) But when my brother messaged me about a 20-year-old MP3 player I gave him, I confess I did feel a little pang of excitement.
The player in question is the Acer MP340 pictured above, which came out in 2006 when I was in my first journalism job. This was before the financial crash, in the days when companies would occasionally let us humble journos keep the odd review sample. And so, being the generous sort that I am, I must have sent it to my brother (possibly in lieu of a birthday present, but let's not dwell on that – I blame the first-job wage).
Anyway, I'm sure he got a lot of enjoyment out of it, despite the tiny 1.8-inch, 160 x 128 TFT display (don't zoom in on the photos of it, or you might fall into the gap between the on-screen pixels). It had two headphone jacks for sharing audio with a friend, voice recording, and could display photos as well as playing videos (albeit only in H.264). It even had playable Sudoku built-in! And if that's not the most early noughties thing ever, I don't know what is (the 2020s equivalent would be a Covid face mask with built-in Wordle, I suppose).
But, life being life, the MP340 soon found its way into my brother's garage, where it remained for well over a decade.
He recently started clearing out this garage, and found the MP340 nestled among the old family photos and pointless receipts. And to his – and my – amazement, it switched on on the first attempt. This is despite lying unused in his lock-up for at least the last 13 years (he can trace this back to when his first child was born).
Which made me think: was the MP340 a marvel of engineering? Were all portable music players of the time this durable? And would today's players pass the same test? I put on a 2006 playlist and went in search of answers.
A changing musical landscape
The MP340 launched in a digital music landscape that's unrecognisable to today's. Back then, downloads ruled the roost, led by iTunes, Rhapsody and Napster in its second, legal incarnation. Spotify was still two years from launch.
The fifth-gen iPod Classic was the player to beat (though this was before Apple started calling it the 'Classic'). And for any serious player offering a significant amount of storage, hard drives were the order of the day.
It's not just the landscape that's changed drastically – the players have too.
The MP340 had 20GB of storage, which you could expand using an SD card. Nowadays any portable player worth its salt supports streaming, though for those of us who prize sound quality, local storage never really went away. The FiiO M21, for example, has 64GB onboard (although as with all modern players, it's flash memory rather than a hard drive) as well as taking microSD cards up to 2TB, as does the pricier – but Award-winning – Astell & Kern A&norma SR35.
Apple did sell an iPod with 160GB of storage, which since became something of a collectible. But that's still paltry compared to today's 2TB-via-expansion options.
Industry experts put the jump in storage down to the introduction of hi-res music downloads.
"The early generation of portable players was built around a simple idea: downloads and on-board storage. You filled a device with files you owned, and those files were usually compressed – a CD rip was about as good as it got," says Dave Yang, Business Lead at Astell & Kern (which grew out of iRiver, so has been in the portable music player market ever since MP3s were a thing).
"When high-resolution downloads arrived, that changed the equation completely. Hi-res files are many times larger, so the demand for storage grew with them."
One other area the MP340 lags behind today's players is battery life. While its headline figure of 10 hours doesn't look too shabby initially, it certainly does once you realise that's with the screen turned off. Keep it switched on, and you'll only get a paltry 3-5 hours. Which is laughable by today's standards (though don't tell that to anyone who's pre-ordered the latest AirPods).
For more serious music fans
The rise of streaming completely changed how people consumed music, while smartphones mean everyone has a pretty sophisticated music player in their pocket at all times. As a result, "A dedicated music player had to justify itself all over again: it needed to offer a genuinely higher-quality alternative to listening on a phone, while still delivering the convenience and usability people had come to expect from their phones," says Yang.
Cheaper players fell by the wayside – why would anyone buy an iPod Shuffle when their phone can do all that and more? As a result, the market was reshaped as a more premium product category aimed at those more interested in sound quality.
While Bluetooth became a given (something missing from the MP340), today's players mostly support wired headphones as well, to provide higher-quality sound – which we welcome, of course.
The MP340 might be a relic of a bygone age, but the fact it still works after so long left unused is seriously impressive, let alone that it's held its charge for all this time.
So is this a one-off? Or were players just hardier in those days?
"That story is very familiar to us," says Yang. "We still see people using our first-generation players today, and when they get in touch, it’s rarely because something has gone wrong." Rather, they're after a new battery to replace the worn-out one that came with the player.
And would today's generation of players still turn on if left untouched for that long? I'll let you know in 2046.
MORE:
Best portable MP3 players: budget to hi-res music players
Why the time is right for a new Sony Walkman
Read our Astell & Kern A&norma SR35 review
