HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
The same amount of music that would need five or six audio CDs can fit on one MP3 CD.
  technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

$129 DVD player plays home-brew MP3 CDs, too


May 20, 2001


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2001, The Syracuse Newspapers

   DVD players don't have to cost much. My wife, Nancy, and I bought one last week for only $129.
   But what makes our new DVD player special isn't the price.What makes it stand out is the way it can play all of our MP3 CDs.
   You heard that right. The Apex AD-600A DVD player we bought for less than $130 plays MP3s, too.
   The Apex 600A also plays regular audio CDs and video CDs, a form of CD that contains medium-quality movie clips along with sound. That makes it just about the most versatile disk player you can find. DVDs are video disks the size of CDs. They're ideal if you like to rent movies, since they never wear out or get dirty the way rental video tapes do.
   The Apex 600A is our first component DVD player, and as soon as it arrived we hooked it up to our TV and watched a movie. (It was "Space Cowboys," Clint Eastwood's example of how bad acting and old stars can make even the best story dull.) The DVD playback quality seemed very good, with only a few artifacts of the MPEG-2 encoding that is used to make DVDs. (We both have DVD drives in our PCs and have watched DVD movies by sending the computer DVD signal to our TV, but that's a hassle, and the picture quality never seemed quite right.)
   As soon as the movie ended, I grabbed a few of my MP3 CDs and played them in the Apex. I was elated. They sounded gorgeous. It was the first time I had heard these recordings on any player other than the one on my PC.
   MP3 is the audio format that compresses music tracks so they can be downloaded or sent in e-mail across the Internet. If you have a CD recorder (a "CD burner"), you can convert CD audio tracks into MP3 files and copy them onto CD-R or CD-RW disks.
   Because MP3s are highly compressed, the same amount of music that would need five or six audio CDs can fit on one MP3 CD. I've made MP3 music CDs that play for nearly six hours.
   The typical problem with this technique is that the MP3 CDs you create can't be played in your home stereo system. Regular audio CD players can't play them, nor can ordinary DVD players. You have to play them on your computer's CD drive.
   The Apex 600A changes all that. It treats CDs that contain MP3 files as if they were regular audio CDs. Pop in an MP3 disk, close the tray and you're all set to listen.
   The Apex shows a menu of what's on the MP3 CD on your TV screen. If your MP3s are stored in folders on a CD, as mine are, the Apex player will show you the folder names and let you click a button on the remote to open those folders so you can play the music inside them. This works quite well.
   If the Apex isn't hooked up to your TV ? if, for example, you're using it just to play music ? you can use a track-and-time readout on the front panel to see what's playing. It's not as informative as the TV menu, but it works.
   How's it sound? In brief, the Apex did an outstanding job playing both audio CDs and MP3 CDs.
   I didn't have any video CDs to try out ? they're popular in Japan and China but not in North America ? but I did get a chance to test some CD-RWs. The Apex played audio CDs and MP3 CDs that I had made on CD-RW disks perfectly. (Most audio CD players made for the home can't play audio CDs made on CD-RW disks. They'll play them if they're made on CD-R disks, but CD-RW disks require a much narrower laser beam.)
   The 600A can be very hard to find. I had searched without luck for a previous model in the Apex line last year after reading about its MP3-playing capabilities, and came across a reference to the current model last week almost by accident. A Web-shopping search engine located the Apex 600A at J&R, a reliable dealer in New York City.
   Go to www.jandr.com and search for the Apex player in the "Search" line near the top of the page. The price as of mid-May was $129. A 3-disk changer version also is available, at less than $200.