Philips EXP431 Pocket MP3-CD Player with Song Title Display

by Philips

Product Details

Product Manual [1.61mb PDF]

• Item Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00009RTBN
• Item model number: EXP431
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

It's small, it's thin, it spins hours of music at a single sitting. It's the EXP431 pocket player from Philips, a potent little unit custom-made for 3-inch recordable CD-R (write-once) and CD-RW discs. It'll play your commercial 3-inch CD singles, of course, but you won't get much mileage out of them--21 minutes at best. Using MP3 encoding, however, you can get more than 3 hours of near-CD-quality music on a single disc, and the EXP431 is compatible with files encoded at anywhere from 32 to 320 kbps, including variable bitrate files.

The player also offers a jaw-dropping 480-seconds of Magic MP3 skip protection--and 200 seconds with audio CDs. Magic indeed. Electronic skip protection automatically stores digital music information during play using a large memory buffer and inserts it in place of lost information when the CD player is bumped or shaken, preventing interruptions caused by shocks and vibration. Playback options include resume (a bookmark function that picks up playback where you last stopped), repeat (track, album, or disc), and random play.

MP3 features include full ID3 tag recognition for convenient song and artist name displays and a navigation system that lets you scroll through discs by either album or by individual track. Navigate using the top-panel controls and the unit's dot-matrix display, or use the supplied LCD remote control if the player is, in fact, in your pocket.

The onboard one-bit digital-to-analog converter renders digital audio as smoothly and accurately as possible. The player also offers shuffle and repeat modes, a heat-resistant body for outdoor use, and a hold switch (which prevents unintended interruptions in playback and saves batteries by negating playback when the player is stopped). Auto power off kicks in one minute after playback has ended, an additional battery-saving convenience.

The player runs for approximately 8 hours (with either MP3 or audio CD playback) on two alkaline AAA batteries. It comes with 2 NiMH rechargeable batteries and an AC power adapter/charger, though it's unclear how long the unit will run when using the rechargeables.

What's in the Box
CD player, stereo headphones, car cassette adapter, 4.5V car cigarette lighter DC power adapter, a belt clip, a user's manual, and free MusicMatch software.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, Speechless, June 30, 2004

By 

Vidius "2sinong" (Urbana, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Philips EXP431 Pocket MP3-CD Player with Song Title Display (Electronics)

This player is amazing small, sleek and beautiful. I have the Philips 401, loved it for it small factor using 8cm cds, but found it a bit too bulky. When I got this, Philips 431, my jaws dropped, 3/4 as small and twice as beautiful. I personally think this is the best deal for money for mp3 players. Here are my reasons:

1. Size. It's true that you can fit 2-3x times more songs on a normal size cd, but the normal size cd player are much too big compared to this. I have the iriver-350 as well, thin and nice but still too big compared to this exp 431.

2. Storage. One could argue that memory-based/hard disk based mp3 players are much smaller than this. But what about the cost? I find the cost for memory/hard disk mp3 players way too expensive. If a cd get scratched, we simply write another cd. But if you hard disk gets screwed up, there goes your couple of hundred dollars. As for the memory-based players, it's too much effort and time to download different songs each time. And for that money that you are paying???

Oh, and did I forget to mention that this wonderful player reads id3 tags as well, so you know what song you are playing!! And with the 480sec skip protection, you can easily bring it with you anywhere :)

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is great!, January 9, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Philips EXP431 Pocket MP3-CD Player with Song Title Display (Electronics)

Stop shopping, this is the one to get. And this is the store to buy from, with Amazon's top service.

These are the things I like about this MP3 player:

Quality construction, small size, nice layout of controls. It has a slide switch on the back to disable all the buttons, so you won't disrupt playback when it is in your pocket. The skip and search controls act like the ones on a CD player. You can press the forward and reverse buttons to go to the next or previous song. If you hold them down, they scan through the song. There are album forward and reverse buttons to skip directly to the next or previous album on your disc. Albums are a group of MP3's in a directory or folder on the disc, which you determine when you burn the disc. It recognizes and displays title and artist tags in the MP3 files if they are there. It also recognizes Joliet-formatted discs so you can use long filenames for the songs. I recommend keeping the filenames to less than 50 characters long because some players have trouble with very long filenames. This player displays the first 39 characters of long filenames, and otherwise does not appear to have a problem with long filenames. There are 2 levels of bass boost and 1 level of treble boost. The battery compartment is inside the lid underneath where you put the CD. The compartment has a hinged lid, so it won't come off and get lost. A remote control comes with the player that can optionally be used between the main unit and the headphones. Other accessories included are a wrist strap, AC adapter, and one blank disc.

These are the things I like about the pocket CD format:

Pocket CDs are so much fun. This format gives you more freedom from your computer, compared to relying on your computer's hard disk space and repeatedly downloading onto just a few memory sticks. You can actually afford enough blank media to convert your whole CD, tape, and record collection to pocket CDs. Disks are typically 210 MB each and very inexpensive when you buy a spindle, and each will hold 3 to 4 hours of music. I like putting whole box sets of Cds on one or two pocket CDs. The CD's you burn for this will also play in most DVD players, so if you have your DVD player connected to your stereo, there you have another way to listen to your collection.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flawless, August 6, 2004

By 

Kevin M (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Philips EXP431 Pocket MP3-CD Player with Song Title Display (Electronics)

I was pleasantly surprised by not only how small this thing is, but how feature packed it is. The attention to detail and design (eg. the optional clip on remote) is awesome, and at this price point, worth every penny. The sound is incredible with my new Sony MDR-EX71SL Fontopia Earbuds (great combo). The unit does come with its own earbuds (which are actually pretty good, a little bulky) but I opted to buy my own. This thing even drives my Sennheiser HD570's fairly well, which are beasts compared to size of the player, and require quite a bit of juice. Not that the Sennheisers would be practical with the Philips EXP431, but I had to try ;)

All in all, a great product. Highly recommended.