[Old-school Review] Samsung YP-E32 (1999)

[lebellium]

Surprise!!
I just bought the first Samsung mp3 player released in 1999: The YP-E32 (meaning there is 32GB...no...hum...32MB internal memory ). The YP-E16 and YP-E64 also exist.
1999, try to imagine that was 12 years ago yet! Samsung was one of the first manufacturers on the market. Only MpMan and Diamond were there some months before.
This device is very hard to find nowadays and still harder to find in this very good state. Only the stock earbuds are lacking.



Here is the box, the very big box. At the time people did not care about the environnement...
"Portable Internet Music Player"


Do you feel the excitement?


Here is the content and surprise! You're not dreaming, it's a parallel cable like on the old printers, not even USB 1.0!!! There was an optional USB adapter but I'm not even sure it has been sold outside Korea


That's a big unit! A good friend for Hifiman^^ But a sober design contrary to some other old Samsung DAPs


The card eject switch. The YP-E32 uses SmartMedia cards ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartMedia ). Thus the memory is expansible up to 64 or 128MB theoretically.
Look at the beautiful logo Eisa Awards - European Internet Audio 1999-2000...


The compartment for the 2 AAA batteries and the parallel port.


Here are the tactile buttons. Note that some modern touchscreen players don't even have volume buttons and almost all modern players have a shitty power/hold button instead of a real sliding hold button. Sometimes the world is regressing...


The 3.5mm earphone jack and the memory card slot.


Just forget USB and MSC/UMS. The first thing to do is to find a computer with a parallel port. Not so easy in 2011... After some try, the Yepp Explorer software finally recognizes the mp3 player. Then you can start transferring your files. 30MB of files have been transfered in 5min7, that's an incredible 0.1MB/s transfer rate Oo
I reencoded my songs in MP3 128kbps because I could not put many files in VBR V0 quality...





On its wonderful LCD screen without backlight, the player displays some id3tags (song title and the artist) and even the bitrate (but weirdly he always said 64kbps for my songs while they are in 128kbps or more...)!
The time elapsed is not accurate at all, seconds change too fast, not only with VBR files but also with CBR Oo

The sound quality is unsurprisingly not so good. But it's still better than....my Star Wars lightsaber MP3 player
There even are some EQ: Jazz, Jazz-3D, Rock, Rock-3D, Classic, Classic-3D. 3D ones just sound terrible, if I worked at Samsung I would have not dared to implement them!





This device features a voice recorder but the ultimate feature is the phone book of course! You can add up to 350 contacts with 2 phone numbers for each one. Yeah that rocks (I wrote some numbers at random, don't try to call)




A small comparison with the Sansa Clip+


10Mhz CPU


What for an advertisement!

[CrowdAds]

[WalkGood]

Very cool, a nice blast from the past and thanks for sharing

[dfkt]

Ewww, welcome to the dark ages... which are trying to catch up again - or are still completely prevalent, when one looks at iPods or the Zune.

[lebellium]

Originally Posted by dfkt

or are still completely prevalent, when one looks at iPods or the Zune.

Never will I buy a non full MSC modern player but I assume iTunes and the Zune software are more user-friendly than this very old Yepp Explorer

[dfkt]

Well, the Yepp Explorer looks very user friendly - it has two columns. I counted them.

[RaduSpeedy]

EyePod doesn't have an expansion slot , yet this Yepp had it 12 years ago

[steinburger1109]

Originally Posted by lebellium

(but weirdly he always said 64kbps for my songs while they are in 128kbps or more...)

Did things go higher than 64 kbps back then? lol

[The DarkSide]

WOW!!! And I think I actually wanted one of these,...

[lebellium]

Originally Posted by steinburger1109

Did things go higher than 64 kbps back then? lol

Well I found that in the Korean user manual (it's not exactly the same display and interface than mine so either the Korean manual has been made from a sample/prototype or the very first version in Korea differs from the worldwide one!) :


So yes things went higher than 64kbps at that time but Microsoft claimed WMA 64kbps was near CD-quality

[steinburger1109]

Originally Posted by The DarkSide

WOW!!! And I think I actually wanted one of these,...

Poor old man...

[The DarkSide]

Originally Posted by steinburger1109

Poor old man...

I think it's time for us all to start staying on topic,...no?!?!?!

[jeffrodigital]

Holy moly i had one of these. Back in the 56k napster days. Didnt hold much and i still had to lug around my discman and cds but who cared ! Digital music with no moving parts ! So cool !

Mine even came with a free 32mb card !

I liked it while i had it. I knew it was pretty much not that good but as an early adpoter you had to know that.

[austinv]

Fantastic review. I was considering this player for my collection (as Samsung's first) and poking around google for more info, when this turned up. Also found the original press release:

Nov 10, 1999
[...]
The Yepp YP-E32 and YP-E64, a portable digital audio player featuring the MP3 audio compression format, priced at $169.99 and $249.99 respectively. The player has both removable SmartMedia(TM) card functionality and 32 MB or 64MB of built-in flash memory.

http://www.samsung.com/us/news/newsR...seq=388&page=1