First up, I was, overall, quite pleased with the sound quality that the DMP-CD100 outputs when playing a regular audio CD. The basic audio CD functions such as repeat and randomize worked as they should and the bass boost feature worked great. Furthermore, the D-Link player didn't insert a 2-second gap between the tracks that the Tavarua had, which is nice to know. Overall, the audio CD playback is comparable to any other regular CD player on the market today.

As for MP3 playback, the experience was also quite enjoyable--although somewhat disappointing at the same time. The playback quality was great and the bass boost actually worked flawlessly compared to the Tavarua's equalizer presets, which made "farting" sounds when set to bass boost. What was disappointing for me, however, was the fact that the player was unable to deliver on D-Link's claim that the DMP-CD100 is able to play MP3 files encoded between 32Kbps to 320Kbps. Most MP3 songs found today are encoded at 128Kbps, which provides extremely high quality audio, but there are those few that are encoded at 160Kbps, 192Kbps or maybe even 256Kbps. The DMP-CD100 was able to handle those encoded at 160Kbps without a problem, but it was not able to play 192Kbps MP3 files properly. This creates an annoyance where, in order to get the songs encoded at the high bit rates to play on the DMP-CD100, one would have to down-sample them on their computer before burning them onto the CD-R's.

For our review of the Genica Tavarua, we had conducted a little test to see what types of CD's and burning methods worked with the player. With the D-Link DMP-CD100, we did the same test, and these are the results:

It's unfortunate that the DMP-CD100 lacks the ability to play from a CD-RW disc but it's good to see that the DMP-CD100 has support for reading multi-session CD's. The lack of CD-RW support means that you will have to use a new CD-R disc every time you wish to change songs and can't delete old songs. On the other hand, the multi-session support is nice to have because it allows you to add new songs to a CD without having to use a new CD-R every time.

Moving along, I tested out D-Link's little T-Digit feature, which is built into the DMP-CD100. Since most people will be putting more than 100 songs onto their CD's, it would be very annoying if they had to repeatedly press the "Next" button to reach, for example, song 143. Genica developed a method for their Tavarua player that basically requires the user to "double-press" the next button and then hold until they reach the desired track number. This worked out very well and I had like it quite a bit. D-Link's T-Digit, however, is a little different. To use it, one would press a button (labeled "T-Digit") to reach a little menu and then, through a few button-strokes, you can change each digit of the track number that you want to switch to. For example, if you wished to switch to track 143, you would press the T-Digit button, set 1 for the hundreds digit, 4 for the tens digit and 3 for the ones digit. As you can probably notice, this method takes quite a bit longer than Genica's approach, and, after I tried to use it a couple times, I found it to be very ineffective. It can be useful if you're currently on track 2 and you want to go to track 130, but overall, I still prefer "double-press" over T-Digit.

Finally, I had tested the battery life of the player to find out how long it will last if you decide to take it along with you as you travel around. To conduct this test, I used alkaline batteries made by Energizer and set the volume on the player to an acceptable level. I then ran the player by playing an MP3 CD, and found out that it lasted for a total of 7 (!) hours before it just shut itself down. This is excellent battery life, especially when compared to the Tavarua's measly 1.5 hours. Furthermore, the addition of a battery recharger in the player means that you can get up to multiple hours of continuous playtime over and over again with just a single pair of Lithium batteries. I must give the DMP-CD100 extra recognition for it's outstanding battery life.

On to: Conclusion