Philips Expanium EXP103 Personal CD Player

My younger son, Garrett, purchased a new Philips 8cm MP3-CD eXpanium Portable Player recently and is quite satisfied with it. This product is smaller than a regular CD MP3 Player and it holds songs in an MP3 format like a regular MP3 player, but you can store the songs on small CD?s, so it ultimately holds more music than the regular CD player, but not more than a CD MP3 player.

The CD?s capacity is 180 Mb and my son was able to record 42 songs on one of the little CD?s! Incredible! One of his goals in purchasing this is that he can burn more music onto the mini-CD?s than on one commercially purchased CD. That way he can listen to more music on a smaller, lighter unit than a typical portable CD player. Less to carry around in his pocket too!

My son was able to burn the songs directly from our computer which he?d downloaded from one of the ?Napster? type clone programs (Limewire, Grokster, Morpheus). If you have a CD Ripper/Extractor Program you can burn songs onto the MP-3 player that way too, although the quality of the song is distinctly lower if you extract them from store-bought music CDs. (There may be a reason for that, but we still have to find out why that is.)

The advantage to having an MP3-CD Player like the Philips that my son bought, is that it holds more songs. It is much smaller and lighter, which is another advantage because it fits right into your pocket. Also, the price is comparable to the traditional CD players he looked at. Yet another advantage is that he can hook it up to a tape adapter into the car (even if there is no CD player in the car) and because of the smaller size it doesn?t get in the way as much as the regular, bulkier ones.

Garrett learned that the traditional MP3 players, even if they state they are able to hold one full hour of music, that the quality of the music is rather poor and can really only easily hold a ? hour of music. With this Philips 8cm Portable MP3-CD Expanium Player, you can listen to more than three hours of music on one 8cm MP3-CD. What a huge difference! This unit also has 100 sec Magic Electronic Skip Protection and is CD, CD-R and CD-RW compatible.

Another fact is that CD Writers with writing speeds of 8x and above can record onto blank 8cm CDs.

The stereo headphones come with bass wave technology and excellent in-ear sound. You only need one AA battery for this unit. When you purchase it, it even comes with one CD and a power pack!

My son went to Circuit City to purchase this item. He had been looking at MP-3 players at Comp USA, Best Buy and finally Circuit City, but the selection in all the stores was not good because of problems in back-ordering. Gradually my son became convinced through comparison shopping of what was available out there, that the Philips 8cm MP3-CD Expanium Portable Player was the choice for him.

My son paid $120 at Circuit City but since then, they seem to have gone down to about $100. There were one or two other choices, which seemed to be lesser quality and therefore, less expensive. We feel he got the best price for the product of what was available. I pretty much have to take his word on this, but he gives it a 3 out of 4 for overall quality.

Philips website is: http://www.philipsusa.com and they also have a toll-free help line at: 800-531-0039.

Thanks for reading!