Review: Ministry of Sound MOSMP075 portable media player

Ministry of Sound has long been renowned for its clubs and dance music, so we had mixed feelings when given its MP3 player, wondering whether the company was simply joining the iPod bandwagon or using it as a tool to push its own music forward.

The MOSMP075 comes with 10 pre-loaded tracks and a free VIP pass into the club.
Very important you may feel, but the ticket didn’t make up for the disappointment when the MP3 player was removed from the velvet packaging, which had concealed the chunkiness of the device.

This size might have been forgiven if we had been presented with a screen in the same proportion, but it's tiny. It’s smaller than the device’s square button key pad - which is not as good as the iPod scroll wheel - but still easy to navigate through the menus and modes.

Worse, the screen is not in colour but yellow and black, so disappears into the vast black casing.
The MOSMP075 took three hours to fully charge, but after 12 hours of use the battery bar was still over half full, which makes the iPod look rather lame.

The DAB radio will automatically tune itself and one press on the menu button lets us choose between a local or full scan. We opted for the full scan, which not only picked up all the standard channels, but also additional stations such as Punjab Radio and OneWord.

Like any standard DAB radio, text information about the radio station scrolls across the screen. Text is displayed in neon yellow and also has a handy signal strength symbol.

However the MOSMP075 seems to be a bit of a city outlaw. It performed perfectly on the outskirts of London but in the inner-city the signal dropped.

Digital music was easy to copy onto the device, via the supplied USB cable. It will hold around 108 CD-quality songs on its 512MB of internal memory, plus it will record and save any digital or FM radio broadcasts.

The sound quality was ok, but sounded a tad distant through the supplied earbuds. Unfortunately it didn't improve much with a pair of Sennheiser headphones.

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