I brought this just before Christmas 2007 as my old stereo had finally given up on me. I purchased this for £69.99 from Argos. I believe that it is widely available from many retailers around the same price.
I chose this particular product as it had a nice, modern and sophisticated design which I felt would fit in well with my decor and particularly for the features which is had. It is small in size- the main unit is (H)22.8cm, (W)14.6cm, (D)21.6cm and the speakers are (H)22.8cm, (W)14.6cm, (D)16cm. It also had all of the features I was looking for- a cd player, FM digital tuner and remote control. It also has the capability to play directly from an MP3 player or similar as it has a direct USB connection. I keep a lot of my music on my mp3 player which I download and often never put the tracks onto cd- so this was absolutely perfect for me.
Aside from these features, it also boasts 40 radio station presets, MP3 playback, USB port, CD-R/CD-RW/WMA-CD playback, 20 track programmable CD, single cassette, clock/Sleep timer, bass reflex speaker system, 3.5in woofer (no idea what that means! and headphone socket (great for when people are playing music which is not to your taste!
My partner set the system up (he is a complete technophobe so it must rate as incredibly easy to set up) and the remote control also included a battery.
The sound quality is excellent and it looks great in my living room. Due to the compact size, it would fit easily on most shelves and look good in both modern and more traditional settings.
The only thing that I can fault the stereo on is that it has an intermittent fault when playing CD-R format dics. Sometimes when you load one of these cds the stereo does not seem to be able to 'read' it and it comes up with 'no disc'. However, I often find that if I take it out and put it back in again it works- I have no yet found a disc that wouldn't play, although it can be irritating taking it out and putting it back in. I have contacted the Philips support centre over the telephone but did not find the staff very helpful and they suggested that I had done something wrong with the CDs! I has only attempted to play pre-recorded cds on this machine before, so it has only been brought to my attention recently. I am currently attempting to locate the receipt in order to see if I can get this looked at- if I so I would happily accept the same model again.
Other from this minor inadequacy I could not find any fault with the stereo and would happily recommend it to other buyers. My advice would be to keep hold of your receipt and to check that it plays all the CD formats which you require it to.
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Mar 20th, 2008
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