LDP-600

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With its large, easy to read display, the Lexar LDP-600 is a music player with sleek looks. Don't be fooled by its small size, as this MP3 player is packed full of features including an SD card slot, FM radio tuner, FM transmitter and voice recorder.

Pros

  • FM radio tuner, FM transmitter, voice recorder, SD card slot, good quality sound

Cons

  • Difficult to grasp controls, play screen cluttered, no line-in recording

Bottom Line

A device packed full of features, the LDP-600 is highly recommended if you can get past the tricky controls.

Would you buy this?

  • Price

    $ 269.00 (AUD)

The most unusual feature of the LDP-600 is the included FM transmitter, which allows you to play music from the unit through your car or home radio. The included transmission antenna simply plugs into the headphone jack and broadcasts the music as FM radio. On the back of the unit is an adjustable FM sensitivity slider, which is used when the signal becomes weak.

We found the Lexar's FM tuning quality excellent. The tuner on the LDP-600 features autoscan with up 20 preset stations and it is able to record FM broadcasts as WAV files at 44KHz and 96Kbps.

The LDP-600 features a large and easy-to-read backlit display that displays four lines of text. The display is clear and it includes an option to change the colour of the backlight to blue, indigo, red, green, violet, yellow or white. The display is quite cluttered. In the main track menu, the LDP-600 displays folder and song titles, track time elapsed, volume level, track number, battery level, equalisation settings and playback speed.

We liked the finish on the LDP-600, which feels quite like a tough rubber-coated surface. Obviously designed to combat marks and scratches, the LDP-600 feels sturdy. During testing we scratched the surface with our fingernails and the marks easily wiped off, showing no signs of day-to-day usage scars.

The controls on the LDP-600 were, for most part, responsive and the volume and change track keys on the top of the unit worked well. All the buttons on the unit are touch sensitive, meaning a single press activates one function and a longer press activates another. We found the controls somewhat difficult to work out at first, so we recommend thoroughly reading over the user guide to save frustration.

The LDP-600 supports MP3 and WMA music and there is no software needed to transfer music from your PC--simply drag and drop files onto the unit, which appears as a removable hard drive when connected to you computer. The LDP-600 only supports USB 1.1, which means transfer times are on the slow side. During testing, it took us seven minutes to transfer approximately 30 songs onto the unit, which is very slow.

The sound quality of the LDP-600 was impressive, and on its highest volume setting, the sound did not skip or crackle. The bass levels are of a reasonable quality and if the regular sound options aren't enough, there is a fully customisable equaliser and six preset equalisation configurations. Also included is a 20 track On-The-Go playlist very similar to that found in Apple's iPod Nano. Other useful features include the option of adjusting the playback speed from as low as 75% to as high as 130%; the ability to use the LDP-600 as a USB SD card reader; and a voice recorder function. We were very impressed with the recording quality on the unit. Furthermore, the SD card slot means you can expand the memory up to an extra 1GB.

Unfortunately, the LDP-600 does not include a line-in recording function--just about the only feature missing from a device packed full of features. Battery life on the unit was rather average for a unit this size, at approximately 12 hours during testing.

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