I have been a Victor Reader Stream
User since October 2007 and have been very happy with it. I recently had to send it back because of a
power supply issue. I felt so bereft I considered buying a back up stream. In
the end, rather than buying an additional Stream I instead bought a Pocket
Plextalk as my backup device. On the Plextalk demo the features sounded
amazing. In reality, although the
Plextalk is a nice device it is not so amazing in practice.
There are points in which the Stream
is clearly still a superior device and there are areas in which the Plextalk
will win out.
The Plextalk is much smaller and sleeker than the Stream. The price for this though appears to be a battery life which is far inferior to the larger battery in the Stream. Whilst I am constantly surprised how long the Stream works for, in use I was surprised how quickly the battery ran out on the Plextalk. The specifications for the devices indicate that you should expect 16 hours use from the stream whilst the Plextalk should deliver 10 hours. The difference felt greater than that though, and I found myself feeling I had to leave the Plextalk charging whenever I did not use it. On the plus side the Plextalk seemed to charge up quickly, though I did not check to see if this was any faster than the Stream.
One nice feature in the Plextalk is that battery life is announced in a precise percentage rather than the high medium low and very low read out of the Stream.
In terms of layout the Plextalk is a nicer device than the stream, with one noticeable exception. The nice features are removed once the Plextalk is in its protective leather case. The positioning of ear phone and microphone sockets makes the Plextalk awkward to use whilst in its case compared to the Stream. The case is a problem all round for the Plextalk. You have to bend back the case leather to access the power socket to charge up. This may be to discourage you to charge the Plextalk whilst it is in its case. Given the frequency with which you need to charge the Plextalk this is an annoyance. Half the numeric buttons become inaccessible when the Plextalk is in its case and finally I found that opening the case flap tended to pull out the earphones from its socket. The only thing about the Plextalk case better than the case which comes with the Stream is the smart and convenient SD card holder.
In terms of the speaker the Plextalk wins hands down. It is feasible to play content at a reasonable quality through the Plextalk speaker whilst the Stream is so quiet to be almost unusable.
When
listening through earphones, the difference between the Stream and Plextalk is
far less noticeable. The
volume range on the Plextalk appears greater which may be important if you are
severely hearing impaired. However, I am borderline severely hearing impaired
and I manage fine with the Stream so you should not think that the stream is
quiet. The Plextalk is louder and seems to give a baser sound to music though.
Here is one area where the Stream continues to be far superior to the Plextalk. The Plextalk has volume, speed and pitch controls however it does not interpret these settings intelligently as does the Stream. Partly this is due to the limited content management features of the Plextalk. The Plextalk recognises Daisy, audio and text content on its SD cards, but unlike the Stream, applies the sound settings across all content. In contrast, the stream is very intelligent in ways we forget. A constant frustration on the Plextalk for example is that I had to readjust the speed of playback from fast to normal when I moved from books to music. Another frustration with the Plextalk is that it is completely incapable of distinguishing audio books from music albums as a result of its limited content organisation. So on the stream the settings for the Daisy book, other books and Music folders are remembered. The Stream will intelligently alter the settings available to suit the content. For example in the Music folder pitch is replaced by bass and treble controls. The Plextalk has a lot of catching up to do here.
The Plextalk has a radically different approach to file management when compared to the Stream. Rather than forcing the organisation of different contents types into folders the Plextalk will intelligently search out content on an SD card and organise this for you into Daisy, audio and text content. You can even put a SD card from your Stream into the Plextalk and it will recognise and sort out how it reports the content. (No changes are made to the SD card so this is safe). This is initially attractive as there is no need to understand folder systems on the SD card. There is an immediate problem though as the Plextalk system will not allow you to distinguish between music and MP3 audio books.
However, the Plextalk starts to struggle as soon as you start to use larger SD cards with lots of content. This is where the rigid structure of the Stream folder system becomes extremely useful. The Stream does not group every thing MP3 into audio. It has Music, Podcasts, and a separate MP3 other books folder. The Stream also has specialist audible folders for books from audible .com. The latest stream update to its software allows you to have multi level folder navigation within the main folder. This is very powerful to navigate for example the Music folder. So for example I have a Folk fodder at level 1, bands including Fairport Convention on level 2 and the albums on level 3. I can then navigate between genres at level 1 to find folk, Bands at level 2 and so on to find the track I want very quickly.
The file navigation features of the Stream are also much more flexible. This is particularly true of text files where the capacity to search for words has been introduced on the Stream.
The Stream and Plextalk have comparable support for file types but the Plextalk cannot currently read Rich Text format files. I have not tried this out but there does not appear to be anything in the Plextalk documentation about being able to read Braille BRF files like the Stream.
Whilst the Stream gives the Plextalk a good spanking when it comes to content management the Plextalk has it all over the Stream when it comes to recording features. The Stream cannot really compare. The stream has a clunky and limited recording facility. If you want to move the recordings onto your PC you will need to use the Stream companion software which will convert the recordings into large WAV files on your PC. If you want to convert these into a more usable mp3 format you will have to use third party software.
In contrast the Plextalk has a whole range of easy to use features. First of all the recordings are all actually daisy recordings. This means that for the advanced user it is possible to edit recordings on the Plextalk and apply navigation headings within the recording. Secondly when you look at this daisy folder on your PC the audio content is already in Mp3 format. Optionally you can record in Wav format.
The Plextalk microphone appears to be of high quality and allied to the reasonable speaker has proved perfect for me, for example, to record and review bird song.
The Plextalk is now my preferred recording device, even if the Stream remains supreme as a media player.
The Plextalk has a clock which I have found surprisingly useful. The other great selling point for the Plextalk is that it has a physical key lock switch. This is far better than the clunky hold down 9 to set key lock on the stream and press 123 to clear.
The Stream has the capacity now to contain not just 1 but 2 voices though I think the voices on both the Stream and the Plextalk are in urgent need of improvement.
Having both devices is nice. They both seem well built pieces of kit. I was lucky, as I won some prize money for some of my academic writing, so I was able to invest in the Plextalk relatively painlessly. If you have to choose between one and another the decision is really dependent on what is important for you. If recording is your priority there is no contest – the \Plextalk is the device for you. If on the other hand you want to listen to large amounts of content, including the study of text files, the Stream remains a far more convenient device. The stream has a large range of file managements and navigation features which the Plextalk cannot match. GW Micro has a new book reader on the block. Whether I can justify buying yet another device to compare is unlikely, but you never know!
David Griffith
Monday, 11 May 2009
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