The Miracle Of Duct Tape (With A Review Tucked In There Somewhere Too!)
Written: May 01 '03 (Updated May 01 '03)
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Pros: Pretty good sound, small and lightweight, many features, cheap
Cons: Only 25-second ESP, a little quiet and lacking bass, small nitpicky stuff
The Bottom Line: A good personal CD player if you're still in the market for one. Check it out.
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| headlessparrot's Full Review: Philips AZ7781 Personal CD Player |
The music that follows us around in our little portable compact disc players has become so important to so many people that it has become a necessity rather than a luxury. I’m a perfect example. For years, my portable CD player has followed me nearly everywhere that I’ve ever been. It seems, at times, deliciously appropriate as you look around, almost as if your chosen music has become the score to your life. Over that period of time, I’ve become so accustomed to having my little machine with me that it’s second nature. The feel of the headphones over my ears is a soothing one, and the gentle vibrations of the player are somehow comforting to the touch. But when the batteries die, I feel naked. Everything seems so boring, so dull and lifeless that it’s almost scary in an amusing sort of way. With dead batteries and the epic arrangements in my ear lost, life loses some of its power and beauty. Perhaps worse is that it means I can no longer hide myself behind the music that I enjoy (but I still carry around a travel case with a good two dozens discs that cover a confusing spectrum of music).
Up until I was about twelve, I had never considered purchasing a portable CD player. After all, I had my trusty Sony Walkman, and seeing as how I still didn’t have a CD burner either, it made more sense to make mix tapes and listen to them. In retrospect, this decision proved that I hadn’t yet developed any sort of discerning interest in the idea of audio and fanaticism in sound quality. I noticed, though, after several months of wandering around with this clumsy cassette deck, that something wasn’t right. For one thing, the sound quality on my mix tapes lacked any sort of clarity. There was all sorts of hiss and distortion, and at some point it registered to me that the player wasn’t spinning any cassettes at the proper speed. By my best guess, there was at least a 3-5% slowdown in the actual spinning of tape from one side to the other. I folded and bought my first portable CD player. For the next week or so, I was hooked. It was a low quality, no name brand product, but I absolutely loved the beautiful sounds it produced.
Being the no-name brand that it was, it broke about two weeks later, and I was shattered. Long story short, I ended up buying a new Discman (I’m aware that Discman is a Sony trademark, but I feel that it’s much less clumsy than any other possible name I could give to a portable CD player) about four or five days before our grade eight class trip. I brought it, along with thirty or forty compact discs, on the trip, and spent the entire time with the small headphones placed over my ears, engrossed by the combination of visual and audio that it seemed to create with the outside world. It’s ironic, too, that these rock and roll discoveries of mine were made in Cleveland - yet perhaps even more deliciously ironic is the fact that our class never visited the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame despite passing within feet of it on our way to the science centre (temptingly located about eighty feet behind the tome of all that is good about music).
If you haven’t guessed yet, or you drifted off at some point or another, you’re probably at least vaguely aware that this portable CD player was the Philips Magnavox AZ 7781 CD player. In three years of devoted service, the AZ 7781 has never let me down. I’ve abused it to a point that should rightfully have already resulted in it’s demise, yet it keeps on ticking - which is quite a surprise, because looking at the AZ 7781 wouldn’t exactly lead one to believe that it was constructed with the utmost care. The old adage “never judge a book by it’s cover” seems somehow appropriate here, even if it would serve it’s purpose better had the phrase gone “never judge a piece of stereo equipment by the bright and flashy colours.”
I guess then, that that little paragraph serves as my leadoff. So why not check out the physical structure of the unit. Out of the package for exactly $100 Canadian (three years ago, meaning there may already be a dramatic price drop), the Philips AZ 7781 came complete with the actual CD player unit itself, a useful AC adaptor that I have since lost to the passing of time, and a set of standard-style headphones (which I’ll get to later). The first thing I noticed about the product picture on the Epinions database was the bright contrast between the gold and silver on the face of the unit, which is far brighter than that on the actual system itself in reality. The top panel has a sort-of metallic theme, with a middle panel painted metallic symbol and an outer part painted metallic gold. But unlike the picture, the difference between the two colours is much more subtle and very stylish considering the bargain bin price that I paid for it. The underside of the unit is simply made of grey plastic with four rubber pads to prevent the system from moving if it accidentally gets hit. The design and structure of the AZ 7781 is simple so that it allows for the unit to take up a minimum of space. Essentially, the actual system is barely larger than the size of a compact disc that it would hold. The batteries don’t have a separate compartment, but are instead relegated to a small encasing underneath where you place the actual disc. The whole player is only a little over an inch high and five inches wide due to the compact placing of buttons and features. A sliding panel on the front side allows you to open and close the lid, and beside it is a volume knob and the headphone inputs. Further up along the side is a three-way switch that allows you to select the CD player’s mode (Standard, Resume and Hold), and on the back of the side is the AC adaptor input. Most of the play options are on the top of the unit, with a small display unit showing the track number, the track length, and which of the different play modes that you have engaged. There are seven face buttons, with the biggest being the one used to turn the system’s ESP on and off. The circular Play/Pause button is beside it, and the slightly smaller Stop button is next to that. On the opposite side of the centred ESP button is the small Program and Mode buttons, and next to those is a larger button labelled DBB. About one half-inch above the ESP button is a longer rectangular key. Pushing on the right side of the key goes to the next track, pushing on the left either restarts a track or skips through tracks backwards. Holding either button acts as a fast forward or rewind function to find a particular part of a song. It’s all pretty standard stuff, and why I’m detailing it so vividly when there’s already a picture for you, I don’t know. Overall, the construction doesn’t look super-sturdy, but my own experiences have proven that it is quite (and, as I’ll later note, even when the casing does break, it keeps on working, which is excellent).
Most of the face buttons and the side switch engage and disengage modes that the majority of portable CD players have. The Program face button allows you to select tracks to play in any order (you can program up to ninety-nine), while the Mode button cycles through all of the different play modes. The first is Scan, where the unit plays the first five or so seconds of ever track, then there’s the standard Repeat All, Repeat One, and Random functions, which do what they advertise. With the side panel switch in the Off position, the AZ 7781 will just play everything normally. In Resume position, if you stop the player and turn it off (achieved by hitting the stop button twice), when you turn it back on, the unit will pick up where it was stopped. In the Hold mode, all of the buttons are deactivated, which is useful if the system will be banging around in your bag or in a pocket so that you don’t accidentally change tracks or something of that ilk. The ESP button activates the AZ 7781’s 25-second electronic shock protection, which is by and large effective unless you are doing something extremely jarring and bouncy. Unfortunately, the batteries are sucked up several hours sooner if you use this mode all of the time (otherwise, the battery life is very good, lasting quite awhile). Tapping the DBB button will activate the Dynamic Bass Boost, increasing the system’s bass output. Holding the same button will turn off the ‘beeping’ noise that is otherwise heard anytime you press a face button.
I’d like to think of myself as a bit of an amateur audiophile, which means that sound quality is one of the most important things to me when it comes to listening to music. Unfortunately, being a broke student rules out the possibilities of fulfilling those audiophile urges, so in the end I’m left to settle for the best combination of price and quality. Considering the price tag attached to it, the AZ 7781 is extremely successful because it sounds very good. Granted, there’s no way it can compare with any of the three and a half systems that I have sitting around my house, but that’s a given. The AZ 7781 does exactly what it promises, providing pretty good sound quality for a price that was actually lower than a couple of bargain brand players also available. With the traditional small open headphones provided, there’s really nothing spectacular, but most of that is because of the relative low quality of those headphones. When I replaced the included set with my own closed, $100 studio-style headphones, there was a vast improvement. Even with a relatively inexpensive set of behind the ear neckband headphones, there was a relatively big jump. The sound reproduction is full and covers most of the range of a CD beautifully, and there’s no bleeding caused by dense or loud instrumentation. There are no tone knobs, but it’s not a particularly large concern, because the sound is right on the mark. My only complaints are the somewhat hushed bass that isn’t helped very much by the use of the Dynamic Bass Boost, and the volume of the unit, which is on the quiet side. Even cranked, the AZ 7781 isn’t particularly loud, but I’m a peculiar person in that I don’t like my music overpoweringly loud.
And like I said already, even though the AZ 7781 doesn’t look particularly sturdy, it is very much so. I’ve had it for over three years now, and I didn’t have a problem for the first one-and-a-half, despite the shoddy treatment and repeated neglect that I’ve laid on the thing. I just tossed it around nonchalantly, throwing it in bags and cramming it into pockets with little concern, but it still held up well. There was no scratching on the surface and no appearance of any real damage (the AZ 7781, by the way, is covered by a one-year warranty, in case you were wondering). What’s more surprising than the initial durability, though, is the fact that it still works even after I proved that it wasn’t actually quite as durable as I thought. I dropped the AZ 7781 from the top shelf of my locker at school just over a year ago, and the unit thanked me by pretty much shattering. A spring in the door mechanism broke, as did a strut that held the lid in position. As a result, my AZ 7781 won’t close, because the door switch has no spring to hold anything in place. Since you can’t play with an open lid, I thought I’d be out of luck, but I was surprised that with a little duct tape holding the lid in place, the unit worked just fine! It’s frustrating that I have to remove and replace the tape when I want to change discs, and the appearance of the system isn’t quite what it used to be, but I have to hand it to Philip. They made a portable CD player that doesn’t quite, which is commendable.
Quite a few people have already turned to portable MP3 players to replace their aging personal CD players, but if you’re still in the market for a discman, you can do a hell of a lot worse than the Philips Magnavox AZ 7781. Not only is it a small unit, but the button size and placement are extremely intuitive, and allow you to cycle through songs and change modes without even having to glance down. The sound is very good, textured rich and full, and there are a wide variety modes that the system uses. It’s light, it’s convenient, and unless you do a lot of physical activity, there’s adequate battery life for a lot of playing time.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 100 Cdn.
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Epinions.com ID:
headlessparrot
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Member: Bryan Jansen
Location: Ontario, Canada
Reviews written: 171
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