The worst part about being broke and unemployed is that you start to notice a general decline in the quality of things you buy at stores. You start looking at 99 cent burgers instead of the main ones you see in commercials. Anyways... I just picked up the Audiophase DM-9137K personal audio CD/mp3 player. At first glance the player seems to have lots of nice key features that stand out from a lot of the low-end audio product brands.

Features:

Functions:

So how does this player sound? I'm no audiophile (obviously, considering I bought an Audiophase product). All I've known before was my old Sony D-E805. That player was simple. Sound was very clean and crisp. The settings on that were Normal, Bass 1, and Bass 2. It was always on Bass 2. This player however has different types of settings. I always thought that the mastering/equalizing was done before a CD was pressed, but oh well. You have the option to set this thing to Normal, Classic, Pop, Jazz, and Rock. I have it set on Rock right now only because I think Rock sounds best on Aiwa sound systems. The player isn't hiss free, that's for sure. Another thing that bugs me a lot is the line out. It seems to be a line out. When you plug in headphones, it sounds very low. But once again, I only know how Sony does it. When I plugged it into my powered PC speakers, it turned out to be just like the Philips EXP201 I had returned the other day. I've always known line out as being "unmodified" sound. When I used my D-E805 there was no volume control or bass adjustment. Just pure sound. The DM-9137K, on the other hand, can be adjusted. I always felt that it was the speaker's or receiver's job to adjust the sound.

Regarding functionality, I'll be short and sweet.  Navigation is pretty simple. Using a 2 line display really shows how much better a bigger display would be. When you are trying to browse for a file, you basically are shown the directory name and the name of the first mp3. You can further select files in that directory. The names are shown by their first 9 characters. Not exactly great when you have directory/file names that are almost 255 characters at times. I've seen this on other players and it sort of bugs me: the dot matrix display does not scroll smoothly. Why is that?!? It might as well be just regular LCD if its not going to scroll. Also... Why isn't there a resume function?!?!

Later on that day... I just back from using the unit in a car. Hmm... Yeah...  It's no Sony. I hate having to adjust both the volume on the player and on the receiver. That SHOULDN'T be the case! The sound quality on some mp3's just sounded all muffled. Yuck!

Physically I can't complain too much about the body of the unit. A window would have been nice but as usual, you get what you pay for.  The form factory is pretty decent. They clearly attempted to model off a Sony design with a simple round look. I do like the fact that the battery compartment has a ribbon for easy removal of batteries. I'm guessing that the silver finish will eventually rub off. I don't quite understand why the display surrounding is orange either. The center CD "holder" (I'm not sure what the technical term is) has plastic teeth to hold the CD in place rather than ball bearings as my old Sony did. That's a good thing since my old player would break on that point and eventually one of the balls fell out and really messed up playback.

For picture and comments you can check out the Audiophase DM-9137K gallery.

Note: Sony MDR-G32 headphones were used during testing.

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