LET'S FACE IT. It's not every day you get confronted with a stereo cassette machine that thinks it's a digital synthesizer. Not every day, either, that the self-same cassette machine actually becomes available for the same sort of money as many other cassette machines, none of which have any ambition beyond simply playing cassettes.

Yet today is just such a day, and the Philips PMC100 is just such a machine. It's a flat box, not much bigger than a seven-inch single and not much heavier than a couple of 12-inchers, and nicely finished (in last year's hi-tech style) in the People's Republic of China. It's a stereo cassette machine, complete with all the necessary connections for recording from your hi-fi system and playing back through it. But that's only the beginning. Beneath the cassette mechanism is a "touch" keyboard, two octaves long, through which you have access to a digital synthesizer offering no fewer than 100 different sounds.

Fifteen of those sounds are for use either as ordinary voices or as part of the PMC's auto-accompaniment section - more of that later. The remaining 85 are plain ordinary voices, though they sound anything but. Philips have used a custom chip (revelling in the name MSI823) to create the PMC's synthesizer system, which the company claims is directly related to the FM digital system pioneered by Yamaha - and still used by that company on most of their electronic keyboards.

Whatever its origins, the system is right on the money soundwise: there's a vast range of tones lurking within the box, from the glitzy "blues guitar" to the sparkling "vibrochime", with all sorts of weird and wonderful noises - "alien", "fuzz star" and "zip", to name but three - in between. The going gets tougher when the PMC tries to imitate more "conventional" instruments: there's a good selection of strings, wind, and brass sounds, but few of them overcome the tinnyness that inevitably creeps into synth voices on machines at this end of the price scale.

Still, a hundred digital synth sounds for under £150 is a prospect you can't afford not to take seriously - and any other features that are thrown in can only be considered a bonus. Well, the PMC "throws in" an incredible number of other features which greatly enhance its appeal.

To begin with, there's an auto-accompaniment section of awesome power. Included here is a built-in drum machine (with passable sounds) and a programmable chord and melody sequencer. You can record your own songs - or indeed other people's - step by step or, if you have confidence in your playing ability, direct from the keyboard in "real time".

Even if you don't have much confidence in your playing, the PMC can offer assistance in the form of "Gling". This quaintly named feature is basically a failsafe measure that lets you play along with any pre-recorded song from the accompaniment section - but doesn't let you make any mistakes. If you play a bum note, the PMC corrects it for you.

If your playing ability improves, you can graduate to the next stage up: "SuperGling". This is much the same as Gling, except that you can program the background chords and notes yourself. If you do this properly, you will, according to the manual, "look and sound like a star". And that's a promise. If neither Gling nor SuperGling seems likely to fit the bill and you fancy yourself as the next Oscar Peterson, you can select "Promode", in which you're free to make as many mistakes as you wish. This is obviously the most creative - and most risky - way of playing the PMC.

Among other assorted options and features, you'll also find a crucially important "transpose" function that allows you instantly to adjust the pitch of any song you record (though it doesn't free you from the keyboard's limited octave range). And there's a Tune option that means any other instruments you or your friends may play don't have to sound out of tune with the PMC.

If you record a complete piece (drum pattern, chord arrangement, melody line) that you're particularly over the moon with, you can use the cassette side of the machine to store the piece as digital data; Philips also supply a cassette full of such data for loading into the PMC and playing along to. The only possible problem here is that it's all too easy to confuse data cassettes with those that simply contain audio. Label your tapes and label them well.

In theory, the PMC100 is an astonishing machine that offers an incredible capacity to make music at a price that is vaguely ludicrous. But in practice, the fact that it offers so much for so little could be its downfall in the eyes of some punters. Having to squeeze so many controls into such a small box has given the machine a massive number of switches (I counted 32 on the control panel alone) most of which do two or sometimes three different jobs. There's a big liquid crystal display (LCD) so you can see exactly what the beast is up to, but working your way around it is like trying to suss out the figures in the 'Financial Times' during a lunch break. In short, getting to know the PMC is rarely a cinch and often a pain.

The meat of the matter is, will the PMC's complexity scare people off? Or will its massive musical potential be enough to win the hearts of the Dixons generation? The next move is yours.

PHILIPS PMC100 COMPOSER: £129 inc VAT

INFO: Philips Consumer Electronics, (Contact Details)