Terratec Promedia m3po Hi-Fi mp3o MP3 CD Player Review
Author: David Pitlyuk
Date Posted: February 22nd, 2001
Introduction
MP3 technology has been ever-evolving, and has moved into nearly everyone's lives. There is an abundance of MP3 devices like portable MP3 players, portable MP3 CD players, etc, etc. It seems like every time you visit Best Buy, there's a few more out there.
We have even seen MP3 players move into all sorts of applications, including the automobile, but today we will see MP3's delve into the high-fidelity home theater.
The product we're going to look at is the Terratec m3po MP3 CD player. What is meant by an MP3 CD player is that you can either have the choice to burn actual MP3 files onto a CD and play them from the player or have the MP3's on a hard drive and play them from the player like that. Don't quite understand, or want to hear more? Don't worry, I'll be going more in depth later on in the review.
So, you've never heard of Terratec have you? Terratec is a company based out of Germany. They make a plethora of multimedia-related products including, sound cards, web cams, and more. You can check them out on the web at Terratec.net.
Specs
Technical specifications
Outputs
In The Box
The m3po comes with the player, a remote control (with batteries), a power chord, a cinch-cord, an MP3 demo CD, documentation, and a 2 year warranty.
The documentation that comes with m3po is very well done, and explains everything in a very easy to read method, but covers everything you need to know. They also include a menu overview of the player LCD that shows all the options in a large branch. This definitely comes in handy.
It also comes with the necessary wires to connect it to your stereo (an composite (red-white)) plug, and a power chord. If for some weird reason you want to attach m3po to your computer you'll have to get a composite to RCA plug (They usually come with portable CD players, so you may have one already).
The remote control is a lifesaver. For the price of this player, it better come with one though :-) On the remote you can do all the normal CD stuff, as well as change the speed of the music and navigate through the LCD screen. One thing that this lacks is volume control, which can be a major pain.
The Player
M3po is a CD player for your stereo. Of course it's a little different than a CD player though. It allows CD's to have MP3 files on them or you can install a hard drive into the player and play MP3's from there. So how does this benefit the user? Since MP3's are compressed with a 1:11 ratio on a normal song on a CD (Using a WAV format), it allows you to store many more songs on each CD, in fact, about 11 songs in place of each song on a normal CD. That means that a burned CD with MP3's can fit 130 5MB songs on each CD. If each of those songs were 3 minutes long, you would have 6.5 hours of music from each CD you burn and play on the m3po. Since CD media is so cheap nowadays, you can really save a lot of money.
A great feature with the m3po is the ability to install a hard drive and store MP3's on that and play off of it. So if you had a 30GB hard drive (Which goes for well under $200 nowadays) you could fit 6000 5MB songs, which, if they were 3 minutes each, would be 18,000 minutes, or 300 hours, or 12.5 days of straight music. Do you get my drift here? That's a lot of music! By the way, it does play regular CD's as well.
Have you seen the picture of the player? This is one sleek looking thing, and I'm proud to have it stacked in with the rest of my stereo. Definitely looks very high-tech, so if looks are important to you, you need not worry with the m3po.
The LCD screen and its options are based on a small "operating system" integrated into the player. This means that Terratec can release updates and fixes, and can just be installed by burning the update on a CD-R or CD-RW and installing it from the player, which they have release by the way.
If you are thinking about installing a hard drive into your m3po player, it's very easy. You simply place it into the slot, put the IDE cable in, put the power cable in, and follow the on-screen instructions to format the drive on the LCD screen. Make sure the hard drive is 3.5" because that is what will fit. Here's a shot with and without the a hard drive:
With hard drive
Without hard drive
Menu Features
The menu is really great, and you can do a lot of things. I'll just explain each "main" section and what's located in its sub-options:
One of the features in the "More" category is called party lock. I thought this was pretty cool, what it does is locks the player using a password, so if you're having a party, your curious friends won't be able to change anything.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Cons
Conclusion
The Terratec mp3o is most definitely a great product, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it anybody that wanted a nice addition to his or her hi-fi system. Just take into consideration the price. When it first came out, the cost was $949, at the time of this article being written, the price was $499. Still a bit expensive, but if you have the money to do so, go for it. Also you need to consider that a hard drive will run you $100-$200 (For a larger drive, you can use a smaller size drive as well) on top of the player if you want to use that option. The player looks cool as hell and does everything it is supposed to do and more!
Rating: 9/10 SystemLogistics