... I'd had an Alba personal stereo in the past, and for £19.99 from Argos (later reduced to £13.31 and almost certainly now out of stock) the PCD604 looked good value. It certainly has been - it's been filling my life with music for the last four months.
For the uninitiated, an mp3 CD player ... Read review
Advantages: Better value than many of the smaller mp3 players. Disadvantages: Doesn't play wma or ogg-vorbis files.
...CD player. I'd had an Alba personal stereo in the past, and for £19.99 from Argos (later reduced to £13.31 and almost certainly now out of stock) the PCD604 looked good value. It certainly has been - it's been filling my life with music for the last four months.
For the uninitiated, an mp3 CD player does exactly what it says on the box: as well as playing ordinary audio CDs, it plays mp3 files from a CD. This means you can cram lots ... ...on how compressed the mp3 files are, but we're talking a dozen or more. (For example, I recently burned 761 minutes worth of music onto a single 700MB disc at at the 'near-CD quality' rate of 128kbps; while at 48kbps - which I find adequate for audiobooks - I've managed to squeeze just over 30 hours onto one 650MB disc.)
The mp3 files can be on any ordinary recordable CD-R disc - even mixed data CDs work - it will find any mp3 files ... more
Earlier this year I decided to retire my old walkpersonalstereo, but not being able to afford a really good mp3 player I decided to go for an mp3 CD player. I'd had an Alba personal stereo in the past, and for £19.99 from Argos (later reduced to £13.31 and almost certainly now out of stock) the PCD604 looked good value. It certainly has been - it's been filling my life with music for the last four months.
For the uninitiated, an mp3 CD player does exactly what it says on the box: as well as playing ordinary audio CDs, it plays mp3 files from a CD. This means you can cram lots of albums onto one disc - exactly how many depends on how compressed the mp3 files are, but we're talking a dozen or more. (For example, I recently burned 761 minutes worth of music onto a single 700MB disc at at the 'near-CD quality' rate of 128kbps; while at 48kbps - which I find adequate for audiobooks - I've managed to squeeze just over 30 hours onto one 650MB disc.)
The mp3 files can be on any ordinary recordable CD-R disc - even mixed data CDs work - it will find any mp3 files on the disc even inside nested folders. But be warned: it does NOT play Windows Media Audio (.wma) files or Ogg Vorbis (.ogg) files - just mp3s. I also had trouble using re-recordable CD-RW discs - I wanted to be able to make temporary recordings of radio shows, say, and listen to them on the move - I couldn't get them to work as mp3 CDs but they do work when formatted as audio CDs.
I've spent the summer giving the PCD604 extensive field trials - mainly while I was at Trent Bridge cricket ground watching Nottinghamshire win the County Championship, but also while on the move. Obviously while I've been moving around it got bumped around a bit, but it has survived very well - hardly ever skipping thanks to its ESP capability. No, it's not psychic, it has Electronic Shock Protection circuitry which reads ahead on the disc so that it can provide continuous playback. This gives it a 45 second buffer for normal audio CDs, and 120 seconds for an mp3 CD.
Obviously it's far more bulky, and therefore less convenient, than a tiny solid state mp3 player, but then some of those mini-mp3 players only have a couple of hundred megabytes of memory - less than the capacity of one compact disc - and I've managed to squeeze mine into a CD carry-box along with a selection of discs which give me several gigabytes worth of music to choose from when I'm out and about.
Oh, and it runs on two ordinary AA batteries - so no sending it back to the manufacturers when the battery conks out. I use rechargeable batteries and I didn't expect them to last very long, but I found I wasn't changing them any more often than I did with my old cassette-playing Walkman - freshly charged ones lasted at least four or five hours.
Plus it has a charging circuit for recharging batteries, although this requires a mains adapter (4.5V at 600mA) which isn't supplied. At home I have been using it with a 5V (2.5A) adapter and it hasn't blown up yet.
The PCD604 also boasts a 64-track programmable memory so you can put together a playlist sequence several hours long. However, this requires a lot of effort - inputting the track numbers one by one - and this cannot be saved, so it has to be done each time. Also, as the machine automatically powers down if it is left inactive for more than sixty seconds, there was at least one occasion when I got distracted for a minute or so, while in the middle of programming in a list of tracks, and had to start all over again because it had switched itself off.
There are the usual features of a CD player as well: you can set it to repeat play a single track, the whole disc, a programmed selection, or (on an mp3 CD) a single album; there's an intro search which will play the first ten seconds of each track; and for the adventurous a random play function. It comes supplied with in-ear headphones which have a decent length of cord (just over a metre) and, of course, it has a bass booster button for the benefit of those people who don't value their hearing.
Overall I'm delighted with it. Obviously I would prefer a 40GB mp3 player small enough to wear as a ring on my finger, and maybe one day such a thing will be both possible and affordable, but in the meantime that burning jealousy I felt whenever I saw someone with an mp3 player (not to mention the shame of still having to use tapes) has been replaced by musical contentment for a couple of £10 notes. (Well, vouchers actually ;-) Now that's what I call value.
