We treated our youngest to a new CD/radio for her birthday. Her old Sanyo one had broken – the CD just died after 13 months! So we had a good look around and not wanting to spend a fortune we went for the Goodmans 1002 micro system from Argos. It cost us £64.99, not a bad price I feel. Now available for £59.99!!

The front of the main unit is primarily square with an LCD display at the top. This display gives you all the information relating to which radio station you are tuned into or which CD track you are listening to – it even displays the volume in dB’s when you alter it. The only thing I found a little strange to get used to was the volume control on the unit – it is an electrical one, so you just turn it slightly to the left or right and hold it there and the volume changes – no need to wind it right round! Sound wise, with each speaker kicking out 12.5w, it is excellent. You don’t have to thrash the thing to get a bit of volume out of it and it plays very nicely at lower volumes too. There are 2 more rows of little silver buttons (14 altogether!) next to the larger volume control. These are the controls for the CD, tuner, clock, sleep/timer, mute etc. All operate really very nicely and positively. There is also a stereo headphone jack on the front of the unit so you don’t have to scrabble around the back when you want to use headphones. If you don’t want to use these buttons then you can easily use the small remote control – which even has a snooze option on it for the mornings! Again, the buttons are nice to touch and very positive. The remote takes 2 x AAA batteries and is quite small (say 3cm x 10cm x 1cm) and fairly light to hold.

The CD tray works very well and as it is at the bottom of the unit is very easy to access. The only downside is that my daughter has to keep her desk tidy in front of the unit so that the tray can slide out! I promise you that this wasn’t a ruse so that she would have to keep her desk tidy all the time! The tray sides in and out very smoothly and the unit will play CD-R discs quite happily, I can say from experience! Goodmans also state that it will. You can programme the unit to play certain tracks and to repeat, it also has a random play feature, which is operated from the remote.

At the back of the unit is an AUX. socket, where you can plug in an outside audio source such as a TV or VCR. Very useful as when her last one died we used this jack to plug in our portable CD player so that she could still listen to her discs! Let’s hope we won’t have to use this one that way!

UPDATE
Well yet another electrical appliance has failed in our household. This one lasted 11 months and although I persuaded Argos to give me a monetary refund rather than vouchers (thank you Argos) that is not really the point. Thank goodness we still had the receipt!! This was bought as a replacement birthday persent, after another system failed (see above), yet this has failed to survive 1 years use. Now we are not a heavy handed family and I can safely say this system was treated relatively gently. The power unit basically died after giving a few days of intermittent service with lots of pops and bangs emerging from the speakers - the clock had been repeatedly gaining time since we purchased it (not a huge problem we thought) and in hindsight I suspect there had been a power fault all along. I no longer recommed this brand, especially as its replacement model does not appear very well made at all and we will not be purchasing that as a replacement!