Battery Operated Toy (Goodmans CDMP 352)

Member Name: Diaz

Product:	Goodmans CDMP 352
Date:	13/12/01 (850 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Plays MP3s, CDRs and CDRWs

Disadvantages: Very basic model, no frills at all and no radio tuner

I bought myself a Christmas present early this year, its a nice toy, I like it. I have a shiny new personal CD player for my car, granted it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you might get no more expensive models but what it does have makes up for it, it plays MP3s Goodmans isn’t a name that particularly inspires a great deal of trust in me, but then again after working in electrical retail most names in general don’t inspire a great deal of trust in me, Sony for instance isn’t much better than shop brands but sells better as it is a recognised brand..



The CDMP352 was the one I plumped for in the end, mainly because it was the cheapest CD player that had the MP3 function, which means you can write MP3 files to a CDR and play them back on your CD player, an MP3 file to those who don’t know is an audio file, be it music or speech. Though if you didn’t know that and you’re reading this on the net you should be shot! Other than the obvious advantage of being able to write your own music files to a disc and play them back for free (of course after you’ve bought all the kit it isn’t very free) the main advantage is that the MP3 file is much smaller than a regular music file which means you can fit a huge amount of music onto a CD, in the first couple of weeks of having this I’ve downloaded way too much music. By way of an illustration of how much you can fit onto it I have one CD with 10 albums on it, I have spoken word recording of all of the Harry Potter books on another CD and The Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit fill another one and a half CD’s Tolkien was just a little bit too big to fit on one CD by himself. All courtesy of the nice people at Audiogalaxy.com. I’m a very bad boy....



It also plays CDRW discs, the re-recordable CDs with no trouble at all, which could be handy, though it won’t play MP3s off CDRWs just regular audio recordings. r>


As for features, it’s a pretty standard piece of kit, nothing to write home about, it has a 25 second over-read on regular recordings, which means you could probably get away with jogging around with it, should the mood take you. When playing MP3s this over read is reduced to 10 seconds, which can be a problem. The trick here would be not to use it with MP3s when jogging, the fact I’m not likely to go jogging ever means this is pretty much a safe bet for me.



It also has a built in charger for NiCad batteries built in, so you don’t have to shell out for a charger, handy but not essential since mine lives on the dashboard of my car and feeds of the ciggie lighter. The kit comes with a mains charger, to run the player in a car you need a car kit, costing another £20 or so for a charger and a cassette converter.



The music can either be output to a line out for plugging into external amplifiers (like a car stereo, or a TV) or it can be amplified internally and sent to head phones, a particularly bad pair of throw away head phones are supplied with the player.



The audio features are Bass Boost, this should make the music sound less tinny by boosting the bass, in practice it can just make the speakers rattle a bit. There are also track repeat, shuffle, random track and intro (first 10 secs of a track previewed) features. Which are all pretty much standard features of anything and again nothing to write home about.



As for its specification I could blind you with science but to be honest it’s unlikely to help you make a better decision about buying this. Some hard ready facts are that it’s dimensions are 130 x 33 x 143mm and it weighs 200g (without batteries) which since it’s glued onto my dashboard doesn’t mean a great deal to me.



The one thing I found a little disappointing was the whole thing came in a plastic blist
er pack, not a cardboard box. Now call me picky but when I spend £60 on something I expect it to come in a proper box and not look as though it came off a pegboard along with the packets of batteries. The instruction manual is also a little disappointing. Thought to be honest there isn’t a great deal of information to tell you about, it’s a very simple machine. Though there is a vital bit of information included, an insert slip tells you how to correctly set the file structure on your MP3 CDs, something that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me straight off the bat. The other thing it takes pains to mention legality of downloading MP3s, OOPS!! Bit late now!



I think at the end of the day this machine has three features the fact it plays CDRWs, MP3s and it has a 10/25 second antishock, other than that there is very little else to say. It’s a reasonable machine for the price and probably the cheapest way of playing MP3s from a CD on the market. I know I sound pretty luke warm about it, but I’m rather glad I have it, I’d like to have spent much more money on something else, but I didn’t and I’m happy with what I’ve got.