Bang for your Buck
Written: May 10 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: inexpensive, small footprint, Plays CD's
Cons: flat sound quality, EATS batteries, Supplies Ear-bud's are horrid.
The Bottom Line: For those looking for a way to make their MP3 collection portable but working on a tight budget. The MPTrip is worth a closer look.
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| aviator4's Full Review: MPTrip MP3-CD Player |
After following another brand of MP3 CD player for about a year, watching delay after delay being published by them, I had almost given up all hope of finding a CD Player that would handle MP3 CD's.
Enter the MPTrip. This little device, while not the state-of-the-art CD player on the market has only one quality above others, but that one quality was enough to warrant a $115 purchase. It Plays CD's that contain Mp3's!
Look and feel
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Upon arrival of my MpTrip, I was amazed to find that it came in a box that resembled something that you would find in a cheap "made-in-taiwan" vendor's tent at the local state fair. Undaunted I opened the box and pulled the little player out of the packaging.
The first thing you will notice is that all the buttons are made of cheap plastic and "plated" with chrome to give them a metal look. The top cover is also made of plastic, but the hinges are well placed and do not lack in strength or bulk. Normal use shouldn't break them.
The next thing you will notice is the TINY LCD display. No, this CD player will not show ID3 tag information. Heck, there's barely enough room to show the track number!
The ear-buds that you will find enclosed with the player are lack-luster. They would work well as an anchor for the bag in your trash can, but thats about it. I would suggest investing in a set of KOSS ear-buds. These are the best I have ever used and the work well with the MPTrip.
Energy Consumption
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The MPTrip comes with a A/C wall adapter. One other neat thing about the MPTrip is that is also has the circutry included to re-charge NiCad or NiMh batteries right in the player! What does this mean? plunk in two rechargeable AA's and plug it in the wall, wait 8 hours and you batteries will be all charged up and ready to go. Meanwhile, you can listen to the player using the A/C adapter. Pretty nice feature.
Using 1500ma AA's by MAHA batteries, I tend to get about 3 hours of play time out of the player before they are dead. There is a "meter" on the LCD display to let you know when youre getting low on juice.
Sound
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The MPTrips sound quality isn't that great. Don't expect the same quality you would get if it were a Kenwood or Sony. But then again, you didn't pay that price either! While the quality isn't stunning, it isn't bad either. The highs and lows tend to be muted slightly, and the "EQ" that has 4 optional settings isn't much help. All it does is accentuate the bad. Again, a good set of Ear Buds can make a huge difference here.
Using a standard CD, the sound quality is much better, just like you would expect from a CD. I am assuming some of the sound shortfalls are due to the MP3 encoding. But I am not sure. There is about a 5 second silence between songs with regular CD's to facilite the Anti-skip feature (which cannot be turned off)
MP3
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The MPTrip (at least the initial release of them) does have a few limits to the MP3's it will play. The MAX bit rate you can use it 128. Any MP3's that are encoded higher than that will sound really strange. The company that produces this little device claims that it doesn't support VBR (Variable bit rate) MP3's however I have had no problem listening to them. What DOES happen with VBR Mp3's is that the LCD that counts time goes NUTS! But the songs play just fine for me.
The system offers several play modes:
Intro (first 15 seconds)
repeat 1 song
repear all songs
random play all songs
program mode
Program mode will allow you to program the order you want the songs to play in.
Navigation is problematic with the MPTrip (Considering you can have up to 200 songs on one CD) They offer a "directory" mode that will allow you to skip directories instead of songs, but getting the MPTrip into that mode is nearly impossible. So, skipping to song number 134 on a 200 song cd takes a while. The best way to use this little player, in my opinion, is to put it into random mode and just let'er rip. This little CD player is virtually skip-proof thanks to it's Anti-skip technology.
I have now used my MPTrip continuously (every night) for a little over 6 months and haven't had any problems with it. I still think that, for the money, you get a nice little MP3 CD player. If you're on a tight budget but just HAVE to have an MP3 CD player, the MPTrip is worth looking at.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
aviator4
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Location: Oklahoma City, OK, USA
Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 0 members
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