Philips Expanium MP3-CD Players

eXp101

As big as any regular audio CD player, this plays both 12-cm audio and MP3 CDs. With a classy silver colored plastic case, the player’s top control panel looks like the Philips Rush portable MP3 player. Other than buttons for play, stop, forward/ skip and rewind, it has two more buttons for mode selection and for programming the playback. Jacks on the left side are for the headphones, lineout and the power adaptor. The right side has sliders for Dynamic Bass Boost, ESP (Electronic Skip Protection) and a Resume/hold function. The headphones have a remote with buttons for skip, play/pause and stop, and a tiny volume dial. The LCD is not backlit and just gives readout of the track number, time and enabled functions. You can smoothly switch between mains and battery while listening . The claimed battery life with two alkaline batteries is about 10 hours in MP3 mode and 14 hours in audio CD mode.

The player did not have any problems playing both audio CD and MP3 audio. We used MP3-CDs burned using Nero. It could easily play MP3 tracks at different bitrates and could even handle VBR. It also plays CD-RWs, but reportedly has some problems with CD-RWs written with Adaptec DirectCD. Skip protection is turned on by default for MP3 CDs. The 100-second ESP could handle banging and rattling easily.

With audio CDs, the controls work as designated. However, for MP3s, the forward/rewind buttons work only for skipping tracks.Also, you have no option to search or forward through a single track of MP3. We missed having a ‘intro play’ mode. The headphones fit snugly in the ears, but the volume was not all that great. Also it has only one sound enhancement feature. Could have done better with some preset graphic equalizers.

eXp401

This is an 8-cm MP3 CD player, almost half the size of the 101. All controls are on the top cover. Apart from the controls on the eXp101, there is an additional pair of ‘Search’ buttons. This takes away the previous drawback of not being able to seek through tracks. A separate set of buttons allows you to skip through albums. The headphones come with a remote that can be clipped onto your shirt collar. The LCD display is still not backlit. The player also does not also have a lineout connection jack. Power is just a single AA-sized alkaline battery or an alternative DC adaptor. However, here if you switch between the power sources while listening to a song, the player ‘reboots’.

As for its performance, we did not have any 8-cm CDR discs and just used the demo CD sent along with the player. For the playback, the volume is louder than the eXp101. The DBB is two-stage and the second level of DBB actually seems to have a surround sound effect.

Great in features and performance, the only drawback is that the 8-cm CDs only store around 155 MB of data. This amounts to around 3 hours of CD-quality music.

Ashish Sharma