Acoustic Solutions SP150 CD player/MP3 jukebox

With more gigs than the Rolling Stones.

Professional footballers and drug dealers used to be the only people rich enough to afford hard disk hi-fi solutions. So the fact that this one is only £200 should draw gasps of disbelief and may even lead to an angry mob of pitchfork-wielding naysayers rampaging around your village green.

For less than the price of an iPod you get a full-size CD player with a built-in 40GB of storage for ripping albums onto. More good news is that anyone could plug this in and get it working in seconds. The only sockets on the back are for stereo hook-up to your amp, and the menu system is a doddle - stick in a CD and it simply asks if you want to play it or store it to the hard disk.

If storing, the player accesses the internally loaded Gracenote CD database for artist, album and track names. Registering with Acoustic Solutions gets you an update CD every month for a year, with all the latest album info on it, but it would have been better to have an Ethernet port for updating through your Internet connection. Still, you've always got the laborious option of entering the info manually using the remote.

Searching your collection for tracks is a joy, thanks to useful options on the remote and a nice big jog-dial on the front of the unit. The only problem is that the screen is too small to be seen from more than a few metres away. Sound quality is pretty good, and you have the option of ripping CDs at various compression rates or uncompressed.

This is superbly good value for money, but a means of updating the Gracenote database more easily and transferring existing MP3s directly from your computer would have made it an awesome proposition.

Related links:

• Acoustic Solutions