Buying a personal CD player

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

I'm looking at buying a personal CD player and i'm willing to spend up to £60 (just above is acceptable), i would like it to read MP3 discs and i would use it when walking fairly fast (i find it gets knocked about in my pocket more than in most peoples, although i could put it in a bag ), i don't really care about battery life as long as its 10 hours+, i mainly want good sound quality. Any ideas on a good one?

Thanks

Ozzy

PS: i'll get a link to a possible one i've found soon.

 

[AceChilla]

You know cd's are about to become obselete don't you. Why don't you buy an normal mp3 player. They are cheaper, smaller and have much larger capacity.

 

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

Cheaper? for £60 you can get a 128/256 mb, smaller? i don't GAF, larger capacity? for the price they would hold 4/5 albums and i could get 8/10 on one MP3 disc, but i like my quality so normally i would use just a normal CD. I buy all my music on CD anyway and my Pc's too pants to use an MP3 player properly. And CD's aren't just gonna become obsolete for music, and if they do i'll still use em .

 

[ummmm........]

The mp3 player would fix your jostling problem, though.

EDIT: I checked Consumer Reports, and the two that performed best in the categories that were important to you were the Sony D-CJ01 and the Panasonic SL-MP50. The Panasonic is $100 and the Sony is $130, don't know what that translates to in pounds (also don't know how to make the little "pound" symbol). The Panasonic had 11 hour battery life and the Sony had 23. I think sound quality has more to do with headphones than players, BTW.

 

[Yom]

Trust me, mp3 players are much better than CD players. A good MP3-playing CD player would be a Sony Walkman DNE510 (which I have), which allowed me to play mp3 cds with ~150 songs on them. However, I like my Sony mp3 player much, much more.

 

[AceChilla]

Well it's your chooice but they have become much cheaper lately. I saw this one: http://www.paradigit.nl/pdf/10005780v.html for 99 euros lately. It has 1.5 gb capacity.

And the quality between cd's and good quality mp3's is unhearable. It's more in your mind than anything else. I have seen blind tests of audiofreaks who could not tell them apart.

 

[ummmm........]

Yeah, a lot of folks have some low quality mp3s, though.

 

[AceChilla]

Yeah, a lot of folks have some low quality mp3s, though.

I rip my own cd's to mp3. You can choose the sampling rate for yourself.

If you kaazaa your mp3 collection then you'll end up with a lot of crap indeed.

 

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

Thanks Ummmm, and sound quality is largely based on headphones but also other factors, i will check out those models .

 

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

Oh and if you use good quality headphones (like the ones i own ) then the difference in sound quality is more obvious.

EDIT: That Panasonic one turns bad after a while and the Sony one is apparently faulty after a time also. I found this one which could be quite good apart from maybe needs better anti-shock .

MOSCD95

 

[AceChilla]

Oh and if you use good quality headphones (like the ones i own ) then the difference in sound quality is more obvious.

Nope, the difference is unhearable even on top-end systems who used gold plated sound cables and such.

I only have the link of the tests in Dutch, but there you'll see all those audiofreaks who stick to cd's because they say the sounds is better making an ass out of themselves for not hearing the difference on their own high-tech systems.

There are also people who will keep saying vinyl records sound better than anything else

 

[ummmm........]

Vinyl does sound better than everything else.

And besides, if someone thinks CDs sound better than mp3s isn't that more important than whether they actually do sound better?

It's like a shot of whisky on a cold day makes you colder, but it makes you feel warmer, which is more important unless you're in danger of freezing to death.

 

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

Thank you Ummmm

 

[AceChilla]

Vinyl does sound better than everything else.

And besides, if someone thinks CDs sound better than mp3s isn't that more important than whether they actually do sound better?

It's like a shot of whisky on a cold day makes you colder, but it makes you feel warmer, which is more important unless you're in danger of freezing to death.

Of course.

It's all about what you enjoy more. That's the bottom line. But maybe if you convince yourself mp3's sound just as good, you enjoy that more.

 

[Syterion]

I got a 50$ mp3 player that can play mp3PRO(half the size of mp3 files, same quality) and it holds 128MB with a card slot for extra memory that can hold up to 512. So mine really holds 640MB(the card was 30$) which is really 1.25gigs of mp3. For 80$.

Not to mention the complete lack of skipping(no moving parts), small size, and armband thing that lets me run with it.

The only annoying thing about it is that it doesn't display the song name on the thing, just "06 Track 6" and stuff like that because all my files were in WMA before I got it. The tracking information didn't work for WMP, so all the new files I get I rip via Musicmatch so it has the info. So it's really my fault.

BTW, does anyone know a free Audio Conversion software that will do WMA->mp3/mp3Pro in batches? They're all limited somehow. And they don't let you re-try the trial.

 

[Suppersalmon]

If you are sure you want a cd player this looks quite good Link

 

[Blasphemous]

BTW, does anyone know a free Audio Conversion software that will do WMA->mp3/mp3Pro in batches? They're all limited somehow. And they don't let you re-try the trial.

dmc should be able to convert pretty much anything to pretty much anything, with the right plugins (and there are alot of them.) It's also free.
For accurately tagging your music files (not sure about wma), MBtagger is highly useful, and pretty cool. The more people use it, the better it becomes!

 

[Chukchi Husky]

Philips EXP3363
200 seconds anti shock, 20 hours playback time...

I use MiniDiscs, but soon I will probably look for an MP3 player (one with a large capacity and WMA compatability)...

 

[Lambert Simnel]

Personally, I found little or no difference between MP3s and CDs for rock/pop music. However, I think classical music loses some detail in MP3.

As I mostly listen to classical, I went for a CD player when faced with a similar decision point last year, but would expect to buy an MP3 player some time in the next 2-3 years.

 

[Lozzy_Ozzy]

Well if i was to get any form of MP3, i would have to get a jukebox, and they cost a bit .