"The latter is particularly valuable as SanDisk has long made a song and dance about being the only mp3 player manufacturer to make its own audio chips."

I don't think so - it may use its own flash chips, but it uses AMS audio processor chips (as the frustrated RockBox devs will tell you http://daniel.haxx.se/sansa/v2.html).

Why do the stupid manufacturers bundle crappy earphones with their players??? I mean, that's a crucial point in the chain, it's here the rubber meets the road, or any other crappy metaphor you might prefer. Most buyers will buy this, use the bundled earphone, and think the player is not that great. Or maybe the manufacturers are right after all... most buyers won't know the difference anyway and think everything is perfect.

..an updated version of my E265. Great player, I would second all the positives you noted. From the review it seems they have cured the only fly in the ointment of the earlier player, the start up time. On my older model, every time it is turned on it refreshes the audio database which means it can take 10 secs or more before the device is usable. If this has been sorted then I will certainly consider a purchase.

I've come to the conclusion that most people are deaf and don't care anyhow. Enjoy your hearing loss and tinnitus.

...and I'm a big fan of the Cowon range. If they do get good OGG/FLAC support, I might be looking at that to replace my loverly D2 (which has 8GB onboard + 16GB SDHC).

The drawbacks with the D2 at present are a slightly flaky database when it comes to indexing the OGG files and really, the device is overpriced - they tend to cost more than similar Apple offerings, and are less styley. Although they sound fabulous - I had great sound out of the box with the D2, and gave up on getting anything good out of the iPod, even with Rockbox and every kind of sound tweak tweaked. The D2 also takes forever to boot when the database needs updating, and it irks me that there isn't a setting for it to automatically resume the music after starting up (it does resume from the track you're playing, but you need to select the Music option and then hit Play).

Assuming the Sandisk offering sounds as good a Cowon beastie, the price is definitely right, it doesn't look fugly, so it'd definitely be an option worth looking into.

My old sansa takes forever to power up and refresh database and i had to replace the battery (once)....but that they made VERY easy.

Speaking of very easy...now if I could just try the controls....

I had the pleasure of getting the Fuze for myself and it sounds a tad better than a nano a friend of mine has. Using the same headphones (we used a sennheiser px200), the fuze was, literally, music to my ears. However, what really impressed me was the memory expansion. I'm looking forward to Sandisk releasing the 16GB microsdhc card soon. A firmware update supporting OGG would be nice.

Why should I have to cover the cost of semi-average headphones that I am never going to use???? At least if they are junk it is only adding a few pence to the cost of the player. If anything, I wish they didn't include any headphones!