[londonman]

I bought recently a Philips DCB852 CD/FM/DAB/iPod player. Not cheap at over £200 but the sound is actually very good. There is just one downside. It cannot play gapless audio CDs like Dark Side of the Moon without a noticeable hiccup as the track changes. Opera is impossible to listen to. So I wrote to Philips asking them if they were going to bring out a model that did. This is the reply that I received from them.


I am sorry to hear about the problems you are having.

I would advise after looking at previous conversations you have had with Philips.

I will advise from the information supplied that this is a disc issue and not a system issue.

Different disc standards use by manufactures can result in the gap issue you are experiencing this is why it does not effect all discs on the market.

Also this system was not designed with the ability to change the settings for this for the gap issue.


I hope this information is of help to you.

Leaving aside the appalling grammar, lack of punctuation and poor sentence construction......what utter tosh.

If he was right then perhaps he could explain why all the 40 or so gapless audio CDs that I have play flawlessly in all the other CD players we have around the house and in the car.

[in_focus]

Typical Philips and the reason they are spent force in consumer electronics. The TV division was sold to a Chinese company called TPV, most other stuff is Vestel and the like.

No signs of any software upgrades on their website so I would be returning it as not fit for purpose.

[Alan Thew]

That reply from Philips is absolute nonsense, and like in_focus I would be returning the item as not fit for purpose.

Unlike DVDs and data CDs, audio CDs do not have a file system, only a rudimentary table of contents (TOC) that marks where each track begins. The audio itself is held in one continuous stream (the same model as the single groove on each side of a gramophone record), so to claim this is a "disc issue" and that "different disc standards use by manufactures can result in the gap issue you are experiencing" is utter rubbish. There is no gap in the audio stream on your audio CD of Dark Side of the Moon, and so any player which artificially inserts one is not functioning correctly.

Modern software-based players do not read the disc in the same way as old-fashioned CD players (which simply read the disc single-speed, keeping an audio data buffer full) but, as an end-user, that's not your problem: the experience should be the same, and if it's not, the software is not fit for the job.

What a sad indictment of a once great company. Philips co-invented the compact disc. Thirty years on, their own staff have no idea how it works.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by Alan Thew

What a sad indictment of a once great company. Philips co-invented the compact disc.

To be fair their contribution was considerably more than 50%, which 'co-invented' implies - Sony only developed the error correction system.

Philips though have always had a bad reputation, for producing 'weird' gear, being unreliable, and having the worst service of any manufacturer.

Thirty years on, their own staff have no idea how it works.

To be fair again - it's unlikely you're speaking to Philips, the helpline number is probably a third party who don't have much of a clue. Most manufacturers have farmed helplines out, Sony for example have farmed theirs out to some place in Egypt!. Humax have apparently taken theirs back over recently, as their third party was worse than useless.

[Alan Thew]

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

To be fair their contribution was considerably more than 50%, which 'co-invented' implies - Sony only developed the error correction system.

Well, even sadder then that they seem to have so little appreciation of the value of their own heritage!

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

Philips though have always had a bad reputation, for producing 'weird' gear, being unreliable, and having the worst service of any manufacturer.

I haven't heard that but I daresay you're right; though being fair I would have to say I've only owned one large Philips product, a separates CD player, and it's well designed and built and has served reliably for over a decade (which can't be said for the Technics machine it replaced). Oh, and their energy-saving lightbulbs are the best I've come across (though whether Philips actually make those I've no idea).

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

To be fair again - it's unlikely you're speaking to Philips, the helpline number is probably a third party who don't have much of a clue.

That may well be the case; indeed I used to work on precisely one of these contracted-out technical support helplines myself (though I hope I was a little more informed about the product I was supporting!) But even if the helpline is run by a third party, anything they say, however ignorant or incompetent, is being said in the name of Philips. If I found out that someone in my employ was pumping out obvious crap to my customers, and doing it all in my name, well, I would act the same way you say Humax have done...

[londonman]

Philips are not alone in this. I was rather taken by the comparable Roberts player and so I emailed them to ask if it supported gapless CDs. That was about a week ago. Still waiting.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Originally Posted by londonman

Philips are not alone in this. I was rather taken by the comparable Roberts player and so I emailed them to ask if it supported gapless CDs. That was about a week ago. Still waiting.

I would have thought they wouldn't have a clue what you';re talking about? - and bear in mind Roberts is part of Morphy Richards, and is simply an importer of cheap Chinese gear.

I would imagine you're struggle to find a CD that doesn't work?.

[jjne]

I owned a late 1980s Philips CD player (early enough to still have a 16-bit oversampling DAC), and even that was poor compared with the Japanese competition of the time.

The sound was comparable to cassette tape (i.e. background hiss and recessed mid-range response), and the player was incapable of playing tracks back correctly when in any kind of programmed mode -- it would play the first quarter of a second of the following track at the end of the track it was playing.

This was at a time when they were still manufacturing these in Belgium/Austria, so there was no excuse. By the mid 1990s they had already farmed production of music systems out to Chinese subcontractors, at a time when the other big manufacturers were still mostly making their own.

So Philips being useless in this area has been ongoing for a very long time.