any Expanium owners in here ?

[DSPguru]

hi guys :),
i were thinking of buying Phillips' protable mp3-cd player.
anyone experienced with it ?

here are the two interesting models, both supports AAC :
http://www.audio.philips.com/found.asp?special_keywords=expanium+CD+portable&AbsPosition=10
http://www.audio.philips.com/found.asp?special_keywords=expanium+CD+portable&AbsPosition=12

[MxxCon]

i never used these newer expanium models. i "beta tested" their original model. it was pretty decent for that time.
of all players that i've seen i think Iriver SlimX is one of the best players. currectly it doesn't support AAC. i don't know how important this is for you, but it has flashbios and it's possible that in the future it'll be able to play AAC and OGG.

[Apfelstruhdl]

i had the expanium 501 and it was pretty good. then a friend kicked it from a table and i bought after that a cheaper one (jamba) for only 100€. if u want aac i think philips is the best to go. for just mp3 playback you could think about buying a cheaper model.

I don't know if it was normal or only an error on my pplayer but the 501 had problems with mp3 containing a tag of version 2.
the displaying of these mp3s was a bit strange. i would try to get some info on that... but maybe it was just my player....

[DSPguru]

yea, i know about the SlimX model, but was looking for AAC support.

@Apfelstruhdl
- did you test its quality with AAC tracks ?
- did the id2 problem only regarded displyaing ? or also playbacking ?

[Apfelstruhdl]

i used it just with mp3

just displaying. it didn't delete the memory, just overwrote it.
when 1st song was :"xxxxxxxxxxx - xxxxxxxx"
and second title was :"yy - yy"

then it was displayed like this "yyxxxxxxx - yyxxxxxxx"
so the old title remained and was just overwritten and if new title was shorter there are still some charachters left from the old title.

[DSPguru]

hehe, i can live with it.

question :
a. what about vbr mp3s, all cool ?
b. why did you buy the 501 rather than 301 ?


10x :),
Dg.

[Apfelstruhdl]

no probs exept the displaying prob.
501 is the only one with title displaying ( i'm pretty sure about that)

i actually got a 301 for xmas but i gave 50€ to get the 501 as the 301 had just numbers for titles and if u have a cd with 300 titles and they just have numbers..... yeah pretty hard to find anything:D .

[DSPguru]

you're right !!! no id3, no go :).

[mrbass]

I bought the exp301 the day it (seems like 2 or 3 years ago I think)came out for $199 at circuit city. About 8 or 10 months later about I bought a rio volt for $140 (friend worked at compusa) and liked it better cuz of filename and dir navigation. With the exp I was carrying around playlists for my cds. Sound output was a tad better on the expanium though. Not sure what it is nowadays though just know they're cheaper than dirt.

[DSPguru]

and you haven't tried to playback aacs ?

[DSPguru]

update :
i bought EXP501 for 169.5 euros.
did a quick test with AAC LC @ 160kbps (vbr!).
it worked fine :D.

Cheers :),
Dg.

[Apfelstruhdl]

where did u buy it????


payd 224 € and got it directly at the workers store(???) but that was shortly after xmas.
did they lower the prices that much??

[DSPguru]

duty free in Netherlands.
but hey, prices are always falling down in this kind of consumer gadgets..

[The Belgain]

A couple of questions: if I want to be able to play an AAC file, does it have to be encoded with Low Complexity? Does this make the quality any worse than Main?

Will it play aps mp3s properly?

If the files have no ID3 tags (none of my mp3s do...i don't like them) will the EXP303 model just display the filename or will it simply display a number?

Also, can the player (and most mp3 CD players in general) read CDs with the Romeo naming convention (which allows filenames longer than 64 characters)?

[DSPguru]

i own exp501.
i mostly use aacenc with "-normal" and acheive reasonable quality that can be playbacked with exp.

it plays aps without a problem. it shows filename for non-id3-tagged files. it will even play badly burned cds (sometime i have buffer underrun problem and end up with cds that can't be read in windows due to crc error - exp doesn't check for crc integrity and keeps playing the mp3).

didn't check romeo naming.

[The Belgain]

Do you mean "-normal" for the quality? Standard doesn't seem to be a profile with the version of aacenc I have.

[DSPguru]

yeap.

[Phobos]

i remember that it can also handle extreme encodes for us uber quality freaks :D

since i live in america, im getting the exp503 for christmas :) . It would be swell that iRiver implements AAC on slimX, but they are being so slow on ogg which is free that it makes me think AAC will have a hard time on it, if not all kinds of hardware players :( well, at least without DRM crap :angry: