REVIEW: Philips Combo Vinyl & CD Player

I was hoping this might have a CD recorder that could capture all those crackles and pops in true HiFi quality. In the mid 80s I had an SVHS video recorder and every new LP I purchased was recorded to SVHS and then I used that as a master tape to make car tapes, althoug by 1994 I was an early adopter with a home made car MP3 player.

That noise gate is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist: "I love the sound of music on records it's the times when there's no music that really puts me off." said no one. If it was a cd burner there would be a slight justification for automatically creating track ids but.. it's not thus it's unnecessary, clunky, and dumb. That money could have been spent on hmm, i dunno, say track buttons or feet. They're likely shoehorning in a part originally intended for that purpose. Tangentially related: Jukeboxes have a gate that is used as a A/B switcher. For example, the sound of the TV (A) is coming through the speakers, a customer plays a song on the jukebox (B), switch sees the voltage of the jukebox audio and flips to B. "Dance Yrself Clean". by LCD Soundsystem is always a treat as the wide dynamic range can tax the threshold setting and make it flip to and fro. I once had a bartender accuse me of breaking their sound system. Btw, I'm single. Please form an orderly queue.

Having the crucial CD function buttons on a phone app only is insane. It's a real trend these days that is quite annoying. My soundbar will only let me tinker with the EQ balance or audio sync through the app on my phone and it does my head in.

One thing I really wonder: how does a CD actually sound, when using and external phono pre-amp & amplifier?

The sound effect when 'MiniMat' appears really adds something to the final edit. Very nice. 🙂

While I *probably* would have bought this a couple years ago when I got my Sony CD and Sony Phono... I'm glad I didn't.

Great video. The idea of using Bluetooth wireless speakers with a turntable is bewildering. Going through all the faff of LPs because analog then digitising it anyway 😄😄😄

The timestamp counter's advancing much too quickly on MP3s likely comes down to programmer laziness. They're dividing the file playback byte position by the bitrate of the first MP3 frame to calculate the timestamp, but that only yields a correct result if the entire file is encoded at the same bitrate. Variable-bitrate MP3s contain an index to enable correct conversions between byte position and timestamp, but utilizing the index requires a little more effort on the part of the firmware engineers. Given that MP3 CD playback appears to have been mostly an afterthought on this device, judging by its lack of support for any other file formats, I'm not surprised that they phoned it in on VBR files.

19:52 question "where is the track skip". Does it just like a bluetooth headset use pressing play button two times fast skip the track?

The ION LP2CD had the same idea all the way back in 2008, but actually got it right, including the ability to record vinyl to CD-Rs. It records the audio to internal flash memory and then burns it to disc when you're done, to prevent vibration from the CD drive getting picked up by the stylus, like on the Anders Nicholson combination turntable/CD recorder/cassette player I reviewed. Plus it has a headphone jack and volume control easily accessible from the front!

As soon as you said it needed an app.. lost interest.

Philips also has a rather hopeless little $60-ish CD/cassette boombox. I bought one for a review, but returned it before recording anything. The cassette mechanism seemed passable, but it can only play through its tiny built-in speakers -- there is no headphone jack or Bluetooth output, despite the fact that the product listing shows headphones next to it in several photos! And it can only play, not record. Plus, there's no handle! The whole point of a boombox is to have a handle to carry it around, but this one doesn't.

Nice review, Mat. I wasn't in the market for a LP+CD-player, but I'm doubly not in the market after seeing this thing. :)

It obviously says 'Reading' as 'Ashby-de-la-Zouch' wouldn't fit. My nephew went to the Reading Festival last year. I asked him what books they studied there. I don't think he got the joke.

I had a Peavey guitar amp with a non-adjustable noise gate. It always cut off the first few milliseconds at the start of a song and cut short the fadeouts. I'd rather have no noise gate than a non-adjustable one

Great video, trash product. Too bad you spent your own money on this.

That's one of the reasons I continue tobe a patron—so you can afford to buy and review these gadgets, so I don't waste my money on them 😊

The Sundays released the album Reading, Writing and Arithmetic in 1990. One of the music papers at the time said it was a tribute to the university where Harriet and Dave studied English literature and mathematics. So when I see reading on cd players I also ask " why that particular town?"

Philips were always counter-intuitive to use! It’s nice to see they've kept that up!

I doubt this product will be selling out fast after a Techmoan review. Love the video. From the, “Take it off” to the puppet head slap. Steadily chuckling at Matt’s escalating disbelief at the awfulness of the Phillips Combo thingy.

I was hopeful at the beginning. I'd be happy to get a record player with integrated pre amp for digital transfer. My computer and my stereo are far apart. But I really don't need one that chops up half of the tracks for 300 quid. Flipping egg

It was poignant to see how the wow and flutter meter, a tremendous bit of industrial tech, also had a Philips logo on it.

Interesting but ultimately sad video. I would imagine the muting can be fixed in a firmware update, but the lack of buttons for stop and track skip would make me want to skip it! A few years ago I bought myself a mid range Pro-Ject turntable. I am using it with a Denon mini hi-fi via a pre-amp but as none of the equipment is actually connected to mains earth there was a hum ( much milder than this horrible Philips). Thankfully Pro-Ject sell an upgraded earthed power supply for such systems which totally solves that issue. Nice that they had thought of such situations. The hifi dealer who I did an initial audition with did not know any of this and blamed hum on their mains supply! Needless to say I did my own homework to understand and confirm I could solve the issue before purchase.

Absolute Temu level trash, it looks cheap and it works cheap. You could buy an Audio Technica LP120 for the same money and that is streets ahead of this. Dutch designers? Were they stoned?

And there's a high likelihood that in 10 years time that app won't be available, so this product would be even more useless. The track info requires you to press a button on the app, where it scrolls the track info on the screen on the device. Why not just show the track info on the app? It would be clearer, and you could display it all the time, so you don't need a button? The designers clearly didn't think this one through.

I wonder how the ending of "A Day In The Life" would sound on this thing with that auto-mute feature? Actually I think we all know the answer to that one.🫤

Oof. Imagine shelling out £270 expecting a decent device, only for this turd to show up. I suppose no one involved in making it has ever actually used a record or CD player. At this point it's less a device and more a parody of one. BTW: I would've mispronounced Reading. English place names are notoriously tricky (for non-native speakers, anyway). Like… Worcester.

This thing is a monstrosity.

Just Another Excellent Video, good sir. I have to admit to wondering, what would you do if 1 year from now they were to send you an updated unit - one that has all the improvements you suggested? I also wonder if there's a pot somewhere in it that you could adjust to set the auto-mute level? An interesting case of 'well, at least the video is made although the money was wasted'.... Pretty much as useful as volcano lamp #3....

If it's from Richer Sounds, do they still have the money back/exchange option if you don't like it? I'd try taking it back! Genuinely wondering if it's faulty, that hum was appalling. Or, did they have s hum problem from start of design, and the phono muting was an attempt to hide it? Great video regardless, and such a disappoi time t from Philips, especially after you'd explained that they're not just badge engineering Ali express stuff.

Great video Matt...and thank you for taking the time to deliver your verdict on this dissapointing product. It seems nobody these days can manufacture hifi as it was back in the 80's and 90's. It's so depressing to see endless lightweight plastic junk coming on the market these days....do a video on Sony ES products from the 80/90's and let the younger generation discover what they missed!

Auto-muting in a record player! Enshittification doesn't stop short of record players....

That's an odd product..... Certainly not for me but glad you took the time to review it

Oh wow that's appalling. That's not fit for purpose. I wonder if this is a case of young kid who's never even seen physical media or its players having one described to them and then design it just extrapolating from a modern everything is an app starting point. That would sort of explain the bizarre interface but still not really. The fade cutout is ridiculous though. This isn't something you'd miss either unless you've only ever tested this with punk records that go from dead quiet to full speed in less than a second. ;-) Then again weird shit happens. I'm reminded of a set of speakers decades ago. They were my parents', and I'd bought a new cd. Played it, thought it was instrumental. Was highly surprised when I played it later on my own stereo to find vocals on every track. The catch being, it was metal with the typical growly vocals, and apparently the speakers just filtered all that out completely. Now you'd think these were some cheap piece of crap speakers, but they were Bose 301s, which at least had something of a name, certainly back in the late 70s / early 80s when they bought them. (Sigh. They had a Technics SL D2 too. Which got thrown out at some point because nobody wanted them anymore.)

Will the app last until the end of the 6-year guarantee? Place your bets.

That is disappointing, but I guess what is to be expected from modern kit these days. The addendum in the box did say don't have speakers too close, that is maybe where the hum was being picked up from? (although the picture on the box contradicts that by showing speakers right next to the unit)

I’m thinking this started out as a very nice clock..then things went badly in Marketing. (That would explain the feet. And the number of buttons. )

Well, that was a disappointing outcome. It's almost as though that auto-mute was designed by someone who had done some research on-line about what vinyl records are like in general, but who had no actual experience of playing them. Or CDs, apparently. btw did that turntable have an idler drive?

Repeat Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) 😜. Frederik & Gerard Philips will turn around in their graves if they knew this product is sold with their name on it... "Designed in the Netherlands": makes me proud that I ditched my Dutch citizenship in some way... 🫢

Nice looking record needle weight. What’s its name

Happy new year! The Reading joke was nice, it reminded me of our old office fax machine that always showed "storing" when sending a fax. It scanned the paper, and, of course, "storing" meant that it was storing a page in memory. But in Dutch, storing is something like "error". So we received regular messages that the fax machine was broken...

Someone had a good idea and then someone else did everything they could to make it as bad as possible. Fantastic! Thanks for wasting your time and money so we don't have to. Sidenote, I don't get why modern devices seem to take so long to read a CD. I have my CD player from about 1990 and once the tray closes it is ready to play in 2 seconds.

i’m genuinely confused how they thought that was worth releasing but if you haven’t already, send that piece of junk back. also at 17:52 there is a bit of a rough edit point

A pros & cons list is a good idea when a product is reviewed. But what when there are no pros to mention? 😅 Thanks for this honest review.

Yes they love Reading a book in Reading... hope that clarifys Matt's joak 🤣 I think this holding company have done something thats very typical of the old Philips, which is tried to do things a bit differently, but made it more of a nightmare than a usefull innovation, like when old Philips made Pickups with a built in stylus, which made buying a new stylus for the thing very expensive. But Phillips also did some absolutely brilliant products, so yeh like Matt says, judge things on their own merit.

I don't suppose there was a setting to turn off the "auto mute" in the app?

Piano black plastic is the devil - I've a BMW Z4, the centre console area is in piano black, it's scratched up and looks crap. Shows up dust and general detritis badly

A turntable that's not like all the others that are produced nowadays with cheap Chinesium mechanisms, combined with a CD player, a preamp and BlueTooth? That could have been a really good idea for people who are getting into owning vinyl and CD's again. Trust TPV to make it completely unusable and uninteresting like Philips used to do in the 1990s.

Ugh. The dystopian present, where we discover that buttons are actually made from gold, other precious metals or maybe straight-up unobtanium and are now too expensive to include on most things. I have no issue with an app offering the same basic functionality as the physical device, nor more complex functions (like the rearranging of track order), but any device that requires an app for simple, normal operation is absolutely a non-starter. I have a Philips OLED TV (made by TP Vision) and I'm extremely happy with it - all of my issues with it are software-based, and those are all Android problems (principally due to pushing an update to a version of Android too demanding for the TV's processor), but hardware wise it's superb, so they can clearly do quality hardware. What a pity this turned out to be a bust, but thank you for the informative and entertaining video, Mat.

Bloody hell, that auto muting on the fades is way worse than I imagined - I thought it was just going to clip the very tail end off (still unacceptable but more likely to attract accusations of nitpickery), that's hopelessly bad

History is full of genius entrepreneurs solving problems that have never been suffered by anybody anywhere, ever. This component is the "Frog and Peach" of home audio. ("I thought to myself, 'where can a young couple, with not too much money to spend, feeling a bit peckish…where can they go to get a really big frog, and a good, fine peach?'")

The longer that review went on the more and more I asked "who is this for?" Quite a terrible product, and I would have thought that some people would like a straightforward physical media player. A few years ago I went looking for an all in one combo CD player and amp with built-in phono amp - not easy! Very limited selection. This video reminded me of this thing I read earlier today: "so many systems have lost the innate intuitiveness from their analog counterparts" https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/06/the-big-regression

Who designed and approved this , I can't imagine anyone involved actually used it?

It did look promising. That Lidl turntable looks a better bet you reviewed a good few years a go but it didn't have a cd player. It was a good price £89.

Not watched yet - can't tell if this is a 90's device or some new licenced badge job... one way to find out!

That's the problem with today's crap electronics - they're not even heavy enough now to use as a doorstop.

I find it amusing that your high-quality Wow and Flutter Meter is a Philips.

Email providers in the modern day are in an annoying cat and mouse game of continuingly having to ensure they have the latest certificates and digital signatures, that allows mail to be transferred between different servers. If a provider is not up to date or found to have lots of users using it to send too much spam it gets put on on a naughty list by other providers. For the end users this tends to result in emails failing silently to be sent with no errors back to the sender.

• I certainly wouldn't want to listen to Pink Floyd LPs without an external preamp. • It could be referring to Reading Railroad or Reading Rainbow. How mysterious. 😆 • Dismal item. I thought it would be better, too. Well now we know, thank you for that. Redecorating and renovating can be both exciting and annoying. Mostly annoying. Good luck. I do like your footstool, nice colors. Take care. 🤍

Btw, Yahoo has gotten messed up in the states, too. I handle emails for my church, and all of a sudden in December, none of the yahoo accounts could send or receive from the church. I'm thinking they did some sort of 'enhanced security' change which resulted in the best possible enhanced security: Just deny all services... that'll teach 'em. And if you have problems with your cat, I'd refer you to the Monty Python sketch, "Confuse a Cat." Cheers.

Patreon really seem to be messing you about.