Philips Expanium EXP103 Personal CD Player

I recently received the Philips Expanium Exp 103 as a birthday gift, after asking for a portable CD player for my daily walks. My husband thought to keep at least one trick up his sleeve and purchased a CD player that could handle both audio CDs and CD-R's of mp3s. My previous experience with portable mp3 units were with the Rio and the Pontis, neither of which had much in the way of memory and were not viable options for long walks, unless I wanted to listen to the same few songs repeatedly. I was actually quite happy to find that there was in fact a portable player that could handle MP3's on a removable medium such as a CD-R, since we already had some of these lying around.

The Expanium looks much like a portable CD player, although it is not specifically designed to be carried around on the body in that it has no special case or clip. The instruction manual says to put the unit on a stable vibration free surface, for automobile use at least; to that end there are two rubber feet on the bottom of the unit. I've been using it either sitting on a stool beside my treadmill, or turned sideways in my baby backpack carrier and I haven't had any problems.

Features
? CD-RW Compatibility - The Expanium can play Rewritable, Recordable CDs as well as audio CDs. It is not compatible with CDi, CDV, DirectCD or DVD.
? Digital Dynamic Bass Boost ? bass enhancement which works with headphone output only
? Magic ESP ? - up to 100 seconds of electronic skip protection at 128 Kbps (the most common mp3 play rate) which prevents the interruption of music due to shocks or bumps.
? Program button ? allows the user to store up to 30 tracks and will play them back in the sequence they were entered.
? Resume/Hold Slider ? the resume function allows the music to pick up from the point stopped on the audio CD, or from the beginning of the last MP3 that was playing. When the slider is moved to the hold position, it disables the keys, thus preventing any inadvertent key presses.
? Mode button - allows the user to select from several different playback options including shuffle, scan, repeat, repeat all shuffle. Shuffle plays the tracks in a random order once, shuffle all repeat plays them repeatedly, scan plays the first ten seconds of each song, and repeat is just a continuous play feature.
? Line out jack ? to connect player to other stereos including an automobile cassette player. An audio signal cable is not included for this purpose, so you will need your own if you wish to do this.
? Display- shows the number of tracks, which track is playing, seconds elapsed, whether a DVD or MP3 disc is in the machine, which of the mode options and features are selected. The display also shows which album number is being played if the user has set up the MP3 disc with multiple albums. Unlike some MP3 players, the Expanium only displays track numbers and not track titles.
? Track selection buttons ? these allow the user to go forward or backward one track at a time when pressed once. Keeping the button depressed with MP3s will scroll the tracks by quickly; with CDs the same action results in a search within the current track. Fast forwarding within an MP3 track is not possible.

Included with the Expanium Exp 103 are a power adapter, earphones, and a car adapter kit with cassette output and voltage converter. A remote control that connects to the headphone jack is available as an option.

The battery life is affected by several variables. Alkaline batteries playing an audio CD with no electronic skip protection will yield the best results with an average of 18 hours of playback. The ESP is automatically on when MP3s are being played, regardless of whether it is switched of manually. The average life of alkaline batteries playing MP3s is approximately 10 hours.

MP3 Considerations
The Expanium can play multi session or single session MP3s. The instruction manual says that if you are burning your own audio CD, make sure to finalize the tracks or they will not play, but MP3 tracks do not have to be finalized. If MP3s and audio tracks are mixed on one disc, only the audio tracks will play.

MP3 tracks must be saved with the .mp3 extension. My husband uses a Mac running Toast to do all of our CD burning, so he made sure the disc was in the ISO 9660 format. The instructions do not specify that this is necessary, but when dealing with OS compatibility issues, this seemed like a good idea. The manual merely says the extension must be used and this is definitely true as the first disc with extensionless tracks did not work.

The Expanium ignores those tracks on the CD that do not have the .mp3 extension, and in the unlikely event there are other documents also saved, it will just skip right over those and get to the music. However, the instructions warn against saving non-audio files with the mp3 extension, because it will try to play a text file in that case, and the results will not be good!

I also found there is one track that simply won't play at all, and we have no idea why this is. It could be some sort of transcription error that occurred during the CD burning process, but we don't really know. I considered the possibility of variable bit rate encoding not being compatible with this player, but that is not mentioned in the instructions. And in fact, the information on Philip's web site specifically states that VBR is supported as well as playback for 32 to 320 Kbps, so I realize that VBR is not the problem. I guess the powers that be have decided that Jethro Tull's Beltane is a song I wouldn't enjoy.

My Experience
I haven't noticed any problems with skips in the music other than a few that appear at regular intervals, suggesting there is a problem with the MP3 track itself. It is easy to program a sequence of tracks to be played back. After the program is over, the unit switches off after a few seconds as an energy saving device, and the program is lost. It is not possible to have the program repeat more than once, for if the repeat option is selected, the one track just gets played over and over. Once the Expanium is turned off, or the case is opened, the program is cleared, so the music will have to be reprogrammed each time that sequence is desired.

There is some general wonkiness with the controls, I've noticed, and I'm not sure how much of that is one option not wanting to cede power to the other. For example, I programmed some tracks in, went onto another and decided I didn't want that track. When I hit play to start my program, the last track started playing. I stopped the playback, checked to see if my program was still there which it was, then tried to play it again?no luck. It turns out that the resume function wanted to dictate the track to be played more than the program function did. Once I turned that off, it worked fine.

The resume function can get a little confused too, once I start moving around from track to track (which I did just for the purpose of this review). Several times I've resumed only to find it went back and played the track before the last track. Then the next time I turned it on it played the next one in line. There is definitely something strange going on when there is a lot of track skipping in an MP3 CD, but in all my normal usage I haven't encountered a problem.

The earphones that come with the Expanium are not the best, but the output seems perfectly adequate for my needs. I do notice some static if I twist the connector in the jack, and that happens no matter which headphones I use. I've tried my big stereo headphones as well as a cheaper pair, and I find that the Philips headphones do the best job for me. They are a bit uncomfortable since they have to be wedged into the ear so as not to fall out, but the sound is better. The output with the over the ear headphones was not loud enough for me even when turned up to full volume, and I am definitely on the sensitive side for these things.


All in all, I would recommend the Philips Expanium as a useful MP3 player and portable CD player. It has already made a difference in my exercise routine in that I can start it playing and not have to worry about running out of music or listening to the same things more than once. I am currently using a CD-R containing 191 MP3s and I haven't gotten to the end yet. Once I've finished the entire disc, my plan is to go back and figure out which tracks I want to program in for a variety of exercise routines. If I just want to play a CD, this player works well and the electronic skip protection is a great feature. In fact, the next time I'm out RVing, I'll have to seriously consider using this player instead of the non-shock proof system installed in the motorhome.