I’ve been using the ihp-120 for a month now, and enough is enough.For such a great piece of hardware, the firmware is just abysmal. I’d stick with it if I thought that some of its issues would be fixed, but in the last six months, iRiver has issued one major firmware fix, and that was only to add one insignificant feature (study mode) and slightly improve another (shuffle play). The major problems still persist, and no end seems to be in sight.
The excessive gaps in playback have become very distracting, and their root cause, constant hard-drive spin-up, continues to eat battery life. As I’ve found, this renders live recording on the unit virtually useless. As the hard drive caches to memory, it causes audible pops and “hitches” in the signal. What’s more, the microphone input is woefully under-powered, and without on-the-fly recording level adjustments, you’re stuck with distortion during sudden dynamic changes. Continued...