Car cd mp3 player review

in July 1999, Wall Street, once the province of well-heeled financiers, extended its hours to 10 p.m., fearing the loss of rank-and-file customers to online after-hours services. This decision signaled the market's realization that its four walls no longer contain the sole arbiters of high finance, dramatically shifting influence to the general trading public. It also illustrates how the elitist school of thought that equates complexity with sophistication is increasingly falling out of favor.

Princeton Disc's 8X write/20X read CDXpress Plus exemplifies this emerging emphasis on achievement over status, substance over style, by embracing a simple, though not simplistic, design and format that fulfills multiple consumer needs with a no-frills approach. Sure, at nearly 16" (L) x 17" (W), 4.25" (H) and 16-pound bulk that will surprise you every time, CDXpress Plus is a cumbersome deviation from any streamlined industry norm. Its design looks like a cross between a '60s stereo receiver (minus the wooden handles) and a recycled PC from the early 90s. The LCD display, which rests above the CD/CD-R-drive, appears to have been made from an old 3-1/2-inch drive bay. Also found on the front panel are the power, reset, and CD-eject buttons, three LED buttons indicating the machine's current status, a headphone jack, and a volume control.

Yet its heft does not prevent the CDXpress Plus from catering to many functions, serving as a CD player, CD recorder, and a CD copier. Indeed, its versatility and ability to fulfill several duties separates it somewhat from the ruck of contestants in the current market. As either an addition to a stereo or computer, CDXpress Plus allows users to copy all CD formats and record and edit audio from both digital and analog sound sources with ease and speed. Connecting the CDXpress to a PC as an external device via a SCSI cable allows it to provide the full range of CD-R functionality, including serving as a back up for data files.

recording the q & a way

In testing, CDExpress burned a 38-minute audio CD in four-and-a-half minutes, after extracting it in 10 minutes at 6X pace. With the unit's plug-connect-then-record installation, I had a burned CD in hand 20 minutes after breaking open the unit's shipment box. No trial and error or prior knowledge is required to begin. A quick instruction sheet for CD-copying stands at the ready, but CDXpress Plus virtually works alone as a direct copier. It detects audio automatically, and therefore can differentiate between CD data types and source and blank discs.

Audio-data copying to the unit's hard drive begins simply by closing the CD-ROM drive tray, burning by replacing the master with the blank. There's no muss and no fuss, just a welcoming message reading "Copy Was Successful!" upon completion. Located at the left of the display on the front panel, two red selection buttons marked "Yes," and "No," succinctly escort the user through the product's many functions.

Those who have trouble coloring inside the lines may feel somewhat inhibited by the restrictive options, but as a guide through the minefield of CD extraction and creation, the CDXpress Plus displays military-like efficiency. Perhaps not surprisingly, the display interface communicates with the user much as a sergeant would talk to his enlisted men--accepting only yes and no responses. In line with its no-nonsense approach, however, CDXpress Plus eschews gradualism in its options menu in favor of a slash-and-burn campaign.

an ear for music

The main menu, which appears when the device is turned on or reset, offers six options: copy, verify, audio CD player, read audio tracks, record audio tracks, and edit audio tracks. Each options contains additional attractive subfunctions. The audio player contains a repeating "loop" option; read audio tracks facilitates the creation of customized CDs from several source discs; and record audio tracks feature allows the user to import sound from any external source to the computer's internal hard drive for audio-CD creation, including radio, MIDI and WAV files, DAT, LPs, cassettes, or live music from a mixing board or a multitrack recorder.

Choose edit audio tracks, and you can manipulate already-extracted files, and play, delete, or rearrange certain songs. The verify option is a quite useful feature as well, particularly if you are remiss in labeling CDs. After scanning the CD, the machine concludes whether the disc is the same as the master, and provides an error message when no audio tracks are verified. CDXpress Plus facilitates nearly effortless LP or cassette-to-CD-conversion, including indexing tracks through an auto-recording silence feature, which marks the end of each track when it encounters a certain length of silence. The user determines the amount, choosing from a half-second and five seconds in intervals of half-seconds. This is a handy feature for users copying entire LPs or LP sides, since it enables the recorder to perform the entire process unattended instead of forcing the user to make manual track-to-track transitions.

As with all other functions, extracting audio from the receiver to CDXpress Plus' hard drive is a relatively innocuous procedure, requiring a simple push of either the yes or the no button. Add to CD tracks on the hard drive, overwrite the previous CD image if it has already been burned, select record mode (manual or auto), and audio source and channel (stereo or mono), and adjust the recording volume level. A "Get Ready To Record (y-record, n-quit)" prompt will appear. After the recording is complete, the song can be replayed through the speaker.

Best of all, CDXpress Plus recognizes flaws in the original source [in my tests, tapes recorded from some venerable LPs) and removes them with nary a trace. Even those for whom the crackle and hiss from old 45s evokes blissful memories of a bygone era should revel in the pristine-quality CDs the unit yields. The player removed a range of unwanted sounds from obvious needle jumps to mild extraneous hiss. In addition, the recording volume level can be adjusted to avoid overdubbing. CDXpress Plus can also salvage smudged or scratched CDs by slowing down the read speed during extraction, allowing battered audio to be reborn. It extracts tracks onto the hard drive at 6X or 4X if the master is without defect, but adjusts to 2X or 1X for greater tolerance of marginal recordings.

In Read CD-Ignore Errs mode, the unit suspends its usual standards and will ignore errors--a method akin to the "Overlap read OFF" function found in the extraction utilities included with CD premastering tools. In a more precise mode, a CD will load slowly, which allows even badly deteriorated discs to be copied. After my deadwood cassettes had been spruced-up onto a CD-format, I next decided to dabble in the latest flavor of the month, MP3 files. I had previously downloaded some tracks from various Web sites, and after burning them onto discs, I was pleased to find that CDXpress Plus lives up to its billing and supports MP3 playback. This is something of a breakthrough in the MP3-to-CD game. Consider typical MP3-to-WAV conversion software, which enables taut 2-3MB MP3 files to be converted to relatively bloated 30MB Red Book-quality WAV files for recording and playback on standard audio players. This is certainly a great way to get some free music onto your home or car stereo, but it takes no advantage of the storage economy of MP3. PC MP3 players, on the other hand, give you access to the music while taking advantage of the memory savings, but obviously restrict playback to the PC, which is, well, restrictive. CDXpress, on the other hand, is designed to replace or augment your CD player as a fixture of your stereo component stack, so it's a fully functional MP3 player, which means it will play back as much as 500 minutes of MP3 tracks in classic CD style.

This function is relatively new, and required newly bundled additional software not available when the device first shipped for review. CDXpress Plus can be upgraded as new formats arise, and Princeton Disc promises additional innovations are on the way. Simply choose "Upgrade Firmware" from the system maintenance menu, and the unit will load the latest software and reset to the main menu.