Choosing a budget
With backlit controls, a snap-on lid, a built-in FM radio, and a compact design, this player offers a great way to enjoy CDs on the go. But for sound quality, it’s a step up from our other choices.
With its thin, disc-shaped, plastic enclosure, the Klim Nomad looks like the portable players some people remember from the 1990s. But it includes many modern touches, including a Bluetooth transmitter and a rechargeable battery. You also get FM radio and MP3 playback from CD-R or TF (microSD) cards. The Nomad’s measured performance in our tests was not impressive, but for portable and general home use, it sounds good.
This affordable player is packed with features. Besides all the extras mentioned above, the Nomad also includes two headphone jacks, which will come in handy if you want to share your music with a friend.
Klim even threw in a semi-hardshell carrying case and a free set of earbuds. We expected the earbuds to be comparable to the freebies you get on airplanes, but they’re much better. We found that the sound was a little diluted but still audible. The earbuds have metal caps with a magnetic backing that attaches to the left and right earbuds to help prevent friction, and the package also includes foam and silicone tips.
The player also has an EQ button that lets you choose between five sound types, including rock, classical, and jazz. We didn’t find them useful, but some people might like them, and they might come in handy if you’re stuck using loud headphones.
The Nomad is very portable. The round chassis is 5.5-inches wide and 1-inch thick, so it’ll slip easily into a laptop bag. Unlike some of our picks, it has a mechanism that locks the controls so you don’t stop playing and accidentally skip when you’re carrying the player or tucking it into your bag. The lid connects to protect the walkway.
Like our other options, the Nomad reads digital data from the CD into a buffer to avoid overruns. But the Nomad must have a really big hard drive: In our tests, sometimes the disk stopped spinning and restarted only when the player needed more data. The music didn’t stop, though.
Large, backlit buttons make using the Nomad easy even in dark settings. The battery lasted about 7 hours in our test.
FM radio and TF card reader are really useful. Usually, when such features are attached to cheap models, they are so limited in functionality that they should not be fooled. But on the Nomad’s top screen, navigating through MP3s stored on the memory card is easy.
The FM radio, which uses headphones as an antenna, can automatically scan for local radio stations, and track skip buttons let you choose between stations. You can also tune in stations manually using the display’s frequency readout, though it’s in 0.1 MHz steps, and it starts at 76 MHz (the lowest US frequency is 87.5 MHz), so getting to my favorite station, KSER 90.7 FM, took 147 keystrokes.
Flaws but not dealbreakers
The performance of the technology is not surprising. Relative to our other choices, the Nomad’s response drops by about 6 decibels in deep bass (20 hertz) and 9 decibels in high treble (20 kilohertz). I didn’t notice this difference in my listening tests because most music doesn’t have much power at those frequency extremes. But if you like dance or hip-hop music with plenty of deep bass or classical music with lots of violins, flutes, and cymbals, you might hear it — although most headphones and earbuds don’t have impressive performance in those ranges, either.
The headphone output delivered only 8.1 mW of power into 32 ohms. That’s loud enough to get the loudest headphones and earbuds on the market, and just 1.2 decibels below what the Syitren R300 achieved.
It may not survive a few hard hits. The Nomad enclosure is made of lightweight plastic, so it may not last as long on the go as our other options would.
It passed the gapless play test. As with our other selections, Nomad produced a small gap in The Beatles’. Abbey Roadbut this is the only player who added the gap between “Waiting for the Bus” and “Jesus Just Left Chicago” on ZZ Top’s. Tres Hombres.