Philips EXP103 eXpanium Portable MP3-CD Player with 45-Second Anti-Skip and Car Kit

Ok, here is the good stuff--The Philips EXpanium has a tough, rugged case. It plays regular audio CDs as well as homemade CD-Rs and CD-RWs, which is a real PLUS! The biggest plus is that it also plays CDs that have been recorded with MP3 files. It can play up to 999 MP3 files, if you can squeeze that many small ones onto a CD. More likely, you will have about 200 songs. Compare that to the 10 or 12 songs you get on a standard audio CD!The sound quality is, as you would expect, great. It has anti-knock protection. It can play the songs in sequence, or shuffle them. It has all the standard features found on most portable CD players. And, it has a separate audio out jack in addition to the headphone jack.Now, for the bad stuff--The silver control buttons look pretty sharp, but they're hard to identify. The LCD display is tiny and not very bright. If you record more than one "album" (that's the name Philips uses to designate a separate file folder), the CD will play all the songs in all the folders (shuffled or not). You can "program" it to play only certain songs, but that's kind of tedious. It would also be nice if the display showed the file name or song title instead of just the sequence number of the file. And, although it does come with a car adapter, I found the volume is not high enough. You have to turn your car stereo volume up to the point where it begins to hum.Overall, it's a good buy, and in my opinion, it represents the future of music players.

I use this player at work to play MP3s, to keep the load off of my CPU. (I don't like the skips you get with WinAMP when the system is loaded.) I have this player hooked up to a Creek OBH-11 headphone amp which is driving a pair of Sennheiser HD-580 headphones. This is high-end gear, and I don't hear any flaws at all in the sound. (I don't claim to be an "audiophile", though: I think 192 Kbit/s MP3 sounds just as good as the original CD. :) ) There is no hiss, crackle, whine or hum.The player has a line out in addition to an amplified headphone out, which is nice if you want to use a headphone amp like I do. It's also useful with the cassette adapter: most cassette players don't like it when you use a cassette adapter with an amplified output. Speaking of the cassette adapter, I don't know if it's Philips' adapter or the player itself, but disks with heavy bass caused my car's speakers to crackle when played with a Sony Discman and Sony adapter combo I have, but there are no problems with the Philips combo. I suspect it's because of the proper "line level" output: the Sony may be overdriving it.This unit comes with many extras that most other [MP3] CD players don't: a cassette adapter, a car power adapter, and a "wall wart" power transformer. You only have to use the batteries when you want to use the player on the go.This unit would have earned 5 stars except for the fact that it forgets everything whenever you hit Stop: how many tracks there are on the CD, and what settings you had selected (e.g. "shuffle"). Also, it will only stay in Pause mode for about 5 seconds before turning off, even when running off of AC power. If I get up and walk away from my desk for a bit, I end up leaving it playing instead of pausing it, just so I don't have to re-scan the disk for tracks and re-enable shuffle mode.It would be nice if it would remember the number of tracks at least until you open the lid; better, it would be nice if it had a memory of, say, the last 10 disks.

It's obvious to me that those people who negatively reviewed this item did not do any research prior to making the purchase.I knew of the limitations of this item (display, seek capabilities, etc) but felt that it was what I was looking for. I have dozens of MP3 CDs and during my test period this product has played numerous tracks from those, as well as from burned CDs and normal market CDs. I am very pleased with the high quality of sound from this thing. The seek time between MP3 tracks is acceptable (about 2 seconds) and even the start time (when you load in an MP3 CD) is ok (about 10 seconds).The main reason I bought this one is because it has no BS software to play around with. You just stick the CD in and go, and it is not limited by MBs of card or on-board memory space. Also, Philips was the first company to develope CD technology - in my opinion that history of quality is continued in this product.Only three complaints: 1) the display angle IS annoying, and hard to see straight on and 2) the battery life is somewhat wimpy, especially in playing MP3 CDs. Use the AC adapter when possible. Lastly 3), the unit itself is somewhat squarish and ugly. More style next time, please.(PS: I think that one of the problems that people are having with this player is that they are not ripping MP3s with with clean file names and are burning CDs with multiple folders. These factors can create a huge problem for the player, slowing it down.)

This is a great MP3-CD Player. In term of sound quality, it is good. When I listen to my MP3s, I notice that piano and guitar harmonics sounds are kind of distorted. Even though I can't tell if it is MP3's encoding problem or the unit's decoding problem, I will say it is MP3's encoding problem because of the way encoders work. Just remember one thing: MP3 player consist of at least 2 important pieces: MP3 decoder which transform MP3 bytestream into waveform, and the D/A convertor which transform waveform into analog signal that we can hear. The MP3 decoder is pretty much 'standard', but the D/A convertor is not. That's where you should look at in term of playback quality, and it is also why I won't buy a shady-brand alternative. Unit does not support ID tags, but it is not a problem to me since I just put inside a drawer in my car. One bad thing in my set up is that I can't do song searching etc. while driving, but perhaps a remote like a standard CD-Player one would help... which is lacking here. I think the MP3 organization on CD can be done with this way (and that's what I do) -- write a README.TXT in each dir that tells you what the heck is in the dir. Name your sub-dir and songs like ALBUM000, 01.mp3 etc. and it should be fine.