Sansa Fuze volume question

[ckrisz]

So I bought a refurb Sansa Fuze from Adorama yesterday for $50.

Been listening to it on my commute this morning and am pretty disturbed to see that I have to crank the volume all the way to the max to get anywhere near the volume I got on my old Sony NWZ-E345 at level 18, which is not remarkably loud.

I checked my region settings and they're North American, so I'm not affected by the EU region issue.

Did I just get a bad player, or are Sansa Fuzes just quiet?

[CrowdAds]

[skip252]

The original Fuze and Clip share the same audio hardware and aren't the loudest players around but they're not that quiet. With any reasonable set of headphones a non EU full volume setting should be uncomfortably loud.

What headphones are you using? Also a couple of the "refurbs" I've had seemed to actually be new. You need to push the headphone plug in harder than what you would expect to make full contact on a unused headphone jack. Have you tried that?

[ckrisz]

My headphones are Nuforce NE-700MXs:

http://nuforce.com/hp/products/ne700mx/index.php

Nothing too demanding.

I'm fairly certain this wasn't new, since I got it in a generic cardboard box with no software. But I've pushed the headphones in as far as they'll go.

Would Rockboxing help in any way?

[skip252]

If you are all ready set to a non EU region setting Rockbox is not going to increase the max volume. The Nuforce NE-700MX are 16 ohm at 105 dB SPL phones so you should be able to get them to a decent volume level without problem.

The only other thing I can think of is to check that the volume level is set to High in the Settings menu. After that I really can't think of anything else except that there's problem with the player.

There's no firmware or hardware reason that you shouldn't be able to get more than sufficient volume with a properly working Fuze. If you're not getting that with the correct settings I'd take it back.