06:00 PM: I played with this new National Library Service (NLS) digital talking book (DTB) player.
I got one from the Pittsburgh branch of National Library Service for the Blind. They were very cordial and in just five minutes, I had one to take home and try.
The player is quite easy to learn; one can pick up the basics without picking up the manual. Having never seen the machine before, I was able to begin playing the first of two books the library loaned me, in less than ten keystrokes.
The two books I’ve played so far have great sound; no doubt owing to the high quality digital recordings made these days. But the player itself has wonderfully clear audio as well; surprising that such a small unit could sound so good, and so loud.
Plus, it seems to be constructed very well, from a very rugged and thick plastic. The device should be able to handle short-distance falls onto carpeted floors without malfunction.
Easy to find, the large, iconic-shaped buttons are a breeze to work. These are both visually and tactilely stimulating (bright colors and easily identifiable shapes through touch). Each button also has braille letters beside it for those who wish to identify functionality by reading instead of by recognizing the different shapes of the keys. All keys are found on the top of the unit. The keys are as follows:
- Tone: UP and DOWN
- Info
- Power ON / OFF
- Previous, Next
- Menu
- Sleep
- Rewind, Fast forward
- Play
- Speed
- Mark
- Volume: UP and DOWN
Ports for headphones and USB are positioned on the right, with the handle facing you.
The cartridges easily insert into a slot on the front edge of the unit, and have a large finger-hole to facilitate removing them. They go in, braille side up. Plus, all books that I’m aware of fit on a single cartridge, and you need not stop every ninety minutes to turn the cartridge over or switch tracks, like you would on a traditional cassette player.
There are no moving parts in these new players; thus, no motors to wear out, no belts to break, and no pinch rollers to harden or become sticky. So unlike the cassette players, these units require no periodic head and roller cleaning. In fact, gone altogether is the audio playback head. Instead, the new cartridges impart their digital audio data to the player through a USB port which is an integral part of the cartridge holder. The elimination of the heads makes a thing of the past the muffled-sounding playback you got when your heads got dirty. This will never happen with these new units. As long as you keep the ports on both player and cartridge clean, you’ll always get the high-fidelity sound that so characterizes these new players. Finally, since these state-of-the-art cartridges have no audio tape inside, this makes tape spillage and jamming in the player an artifact of a far less advanced time in talking book playback; a time that fortunately, we’ve evolved way beyond.
I’ll miss the “speech chatter” that you used to get when fast-advancing or fast-reversing cassettes on those old GE four-track recorders and players of the 1980s when fast-forwarding or rewinding. In this player now, there’s no need to bear all that battery-sapping noise in order to hear the chapter index tones. This digital player and the books recorded for it come equipped with an index built in; you can instantly skip to the next or previous chapters, without waiding through all that rapid-fire chattery audio.
The REWIND and FAST FORWARD buttons on this DTB player work like the corresponding buttons on a CD player. When pressed and held down, they don’t actually speed up the audio. Rather, they omit small fragments of it but play the remaining fragments at normal speed. This has the effect of speeding up the playback, without the “chipmunk” sound of the cassette players of yester-year. Further, unlike traditional REWIND and FAST FORWARD, the playback advances or digresses at faster rates. The longer you hold down the button. The longer you hold down the button, the bigger the jumps the unit makes. Initially, the skipping goes in five-second increments. Then if you keep the button pressed down, it jumps to one-minute intervals, and you hear an announcement telling you how much time in the recording has been skipped. Keep holding the button, and you get five and ten minute jumps.
Readers may purchase blank 2GB cartridges for $12 (plus shipping) they mentioned at the library, and then download books from the NLS DTB website and put on these cards. You can place as many books on a single cartridge the available space will allow. a 2GB cartridge can hold approximately twenty NLS talking books. With an appropriate cable, you can also connect a thumb drive or other USB storage device, to the USB port on the right side.
It has a built-in rechargeable battery that lasts more than 29 hours playing time between charges (according to the audible battery level indicator). Plus, the built-in power cord means that you don’t have to keep track of a separate charger cable.
You get easily four times the listen time per charge, as compared with the previous generation table-top cassette talking book players. Nice. Further, they’ve eliminated the problem of overcharging the battery should you leave the player plugged in for too long a time. This new unit contains state-of-the-art battery recharging technology, that monitors the level of charge in the battery, and decreases the charge current as the battery approaches the fully-charged condition to avoid overheating. This means that you can leave the unit plugged in full-time without destroying its battery. Big improvement!
The unit has no visual screen, and thus, speaks all the important functions with the Tom voice that Victor Reader Stream users are quite familiar with. In fact, it makes similar sounds to the Stream; perhaps owing to the fact that the Stream as well as this player are both manufactured by the same company; Humanware.
Yes, this player seems to have been well worth the wait. I plan on reading more books on it this year to get a more definitive understanding of it’s operations and overall quality. But initial indications are that it’s really quite good.
Tom Hesley
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