While it may seem hard to believe, the Prism DuroSport 6000 is not the worst product we’ve been asked to review. The DuroSport company produces a line of accessories that are every bit as unique as their digital audio player.
iTunes Compatibility Kit:
The DuroSport marketing department is billing this kit as the cornerstone of the company’s “switch” campaign in which iPod users are encouraged to switch to the Prism DuroSport. While we were initially intrigued by the possibility of a kit that would allow consumers to easily transfer their iTunes music to a non-apple player, we quickly realized that the word “easy” could never be applied to this product.
At first glance the product looks like a cassette player built to plug into a PC drive bay. Upon reading the instructions we realized that, in fact, that’s what the product actually is—with a few caveats of course.
According to the company’s website you can transfer iTunes songs to a DuroSport compatible format at a speed of 2x — which to DuroSport means double real time. For some reason DuroSport strongly recommends that you use their brand of cassette tape. It might be because cassette tapes in general are becoming increasingly difficult to find, or perhaps its the fact that DuroSport charges $12 US for a single C90 (a three pack is available for $45 US). At any rate, once you’ve transfered your music to cassette, you then play the tape back through the PC cassette drive and capture the taped audio output as a digital music file. It’s all fairly complicated, and the resulting sound is not very good.
During our testing the supplied DuroSport cassette drivers froze our Windows XP test system causing us to reboot after every third song. If this is how you switch we’ll stick with our iPods.
Auto Adapter
Once you’ve converted your iTunes library to the DuroSport format you’ll probably want to listen to music in your car.
The DuroSport Auto Adapter has been designed for just that purpose. Unlike other adapters that use a radio frequency to broadcast audio to your car’s stereo system, the DuroSport adapter plugs into the cigarette lighter and uses your car’s internal wiring to send audio to your speakers. While it’s an amazing technological feat (and probably a fire hazard), the resulting sound horrible. It’s sort of sounds like a swarm of bees is living in the trunk of your car.
Wireless Adapter
DuroSport calls its Wireless Home Audio Technology WHAT, but it would probably be more accurate to call it WHY. The wireless adapter allows you to broadcast music from your Prism DuroSport to a home stereo, with a few notable limitations. For example, the wireless adapter draws so much power that the Prism DuroSport must be plugged in at all times. Between the DuroSport power cable, the WHAT power cable, and the wireless connector cable, we found the DuroSport’s wireless mode to be a seemingly endless tangle of cables and cords.
To be fair, once we got it all up and running it worked quite well. Maybe too well. Several neighbors stopped by our house to complain that they could hear our music through their kitchen appliances.
These people are retarded.
Plus are you sure it’s not actually a joke.
BAH