Vertical Horizon Plays MP3 for Cheap

Just because you’re a gadget freak doesn’t mean you have to spend a fortune.

That’s the mantra over at Vertical Horizon, a Garden Grove start-up that promises to make the cheapest MP3 toys in the industry. Its first offering is a stereo component device that plays both regular audio CDs and CDs burned with MP3 files.

Vertical Horizon systems are inexpensive--only $120 for the CD-MP3 player, compared with Creative Labs’ $299 hand-held Nomad or Diamond Multimedia’s $269 Rio 500. The reason the Nomad and the Rio cost more is because they have a lot of flash memory--which is very expensive--built into the devices. That memory is what people use to store their music inside the tiny, Walkman-like boxes.

Vertical Horizon’s device, however, relies on people using a CD as the means of storing their MP3 files. Pop the disk into the company’s Eclectic, a stereo-component device that hooks up to your home entertainment system. The company’s patent-pending technology then reads the files on the disk, distinguishes it between an audio CD and collection of MP3 files, then decodes these files if necessary.

And like any MP3 player, there is a trade-off in quality: The digital tunes sound great, if they were “ripped”--or copied--well. But the upside is music fans can store up to 150 MP3 files on a single CD and now play the disk somewhere other than on a personal computer.

Later next year, the company expects to roll out a series of hand-held units that use flash memory: a headphone prototype that houses 16 megabytes of flash memory--or about 20 minutes of music--for storing digital tunes. (The company says that later versions will have up to 32 MB, and the ability to add more with storage--and therefore, more music--with removable flash cards.)