Exonion MPZoo
Editors' Choice
The Exonion is an sudio CD player that will also play CD-R/RWs of MP3, giving the benefits of removable media with the extra room provided by 650MB of space on a CD. The whole unit is the same size as a standard portable CD player, though it has a few more buttons and a larger screen than most. It is fairly light at 275 grams without batteries and feels quite tough. You may think the fact that it has a CD spinning inside it would make it susceptible to shocks but it does not. The unit has an eight-minute Electronic Skip Protection (ESP) buffer when playing MP3s and a 48-second buffer for normal audio CDs. In fact we noticed that when playing MP3s the unit reads the whole file and then the CD spins down and the track is played from memory.
The unit has a smallish backlit blue LCD display, but it is jam-packed with information. When you are playing MP3s you see: mode icon, repeat, equaliser, bass, ESP, battery, title, artist, display mode, track number and total, sampling frequency and bit rate, play animation, and track time.
The unit has controls on the front for play/pause/on and stop/off, up, down, forward and reverse, and select, erase, and mode buttons under the LCD. The right side features the headphone, line out and power jacks, and there is a lock control on the left side. The remote control has almost all the same controls except select and mode. The FIF (Fields in Filename) file format is one of the best features of this unit. Instead of reading the last few bytes of an MP3 file to find the embedded ID3 tag which contains the artist, title and genre, the information is all stored in the track's file name.
If your files are not in FIF format, do not panic, there is software included in the package to help you change your filenames. Most files we used transferred automatically, though there some problems with files that already contained hyphens. Changing files into FIF can be a little time consuming but it's well worth it when you can search for any MP3 you want on the fly via any of the FIF fields. In addition to this, the player can play MP3s contained in Directories and Subdirectories, so you can organise a few albums into directories and just play that album if you wish.
The only other software supplied with the Exonion is the MusicMatch Jukebox for ripping and playing CDs. A pair of AA rechargeable batteries supply power to the unit, giving it a rated life of 10 hours.
If you are looking in the larger side of the portable market, the Exonion is the way to go. With blank CD media costs down to about 50 cents each, the Exonion is portable, easy to use, has good earphones and is relatively inexpensive. The FIF feature is a real bonus.
Exonion MPZoo
Company:MPZoo
Ph:Ph:03 9528 5744
Price:AU$499
Speed Rating: N/A
Earphone Quality:
Features:
Ease of Use:
Overall Score:
6%
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