A great portable choice!
Written: Jun 08 '01
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Pros: Good battery life, CDR/CDRW reading, anti-skip, car/home power adapters, tape adapter, headphones
Cons: Occational skip, sometimes hard to find songs, quirky programing
The Bottom Line: For $100, including tax or shipping, you can't go wrong with this wonderful piece of equiptment. Much better than the alternative of card or chip based MP3 players.
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| OCBTracker's Full Review: Memorex MPD8505 Personal CD Player |
Memorex Model MPD8505CP MP3 Personel CD Player
Ever since the first models showed up in the orient, I wanted one. Desperately. But whenever the opportunity came up to purchase one, I was low on funds, and was unable to afford it. Luckily, I had both the funds, and the opportunity, this past week to purchase one, and have been using it ever since.
Let us first compare this to the MP3 players that absorbed much of the market upto this point. The Diamond Rio – a wonderful device. But as anyone who has used them for any period of time will tell you, they can be highly frustrating. The small 64MB memory cards hold a CD’s worth of music. If you compress the music enough, you can squeeze three onto the cartridge.
But you also have to plug the thing into your computer to transfer a new cartridge’s worth of music, or pay a near fortune for extra cards. And as many of my friends told me, they would gather these ‘sets’ onto CDs to make the organization easier.
The ideal solution, of course, is a CD player that can play MP3’s. And Memorex has delivered an excellent little package at a very reasonable price. Street priced at $89.95, it is competitive with traditional personal CD players on the market. Like any good one on the market today, it has a 45 second no-skip feature, which means you can put it virtually anywhere, in nearly any position, and it will play your traditional CD. Joggers will find this to be a fine CD player, as well as hikers and the like.
With the CD player, in this value packed kit, comes a tape adapter, a car power adapter and a home power adapter, as well as an inexpensive pair of headphones. The only things that the package is missing are the two AA batteries that power it.
The real fun comes when you start burning your own CDs. I’m making the assumption that most out there already have one of these very handy devices, and if you don’t, stop reading this and go get one.
For my first CD, I took the pile of CDs that make up the audio book version of Harry Potter’s 4 volumes. To take these on the road with me, I need a small binder to hold all the discs. When I was done, however, I had compressed all four onto one CD. Twenty-eight hours of entertainment on a single disc.
Next, I took a collection of the ‘Best of’ for the 1980’s, six CDs, and using one of the more high quality conversions, put them all on a single disc, and had room for a couple more albums.
The player supports 74 minute and 80 minute CDs, will handle CDRs or CDRWs, and allow you to organize your music in directories. You can repeat a favorite directory, song, the whole disc, or randomly play songs. A basic programming feature allows you to choose twenty or so favorites to listen to, but does not save that programming – it makes the feature less than useful.
The MP3 decoder can handle variable bit rate MP3s. What that means is you can usually choose a higher than normal bitrate and get better compression. A couple others that were on display when I went back did not play this format, so if you’re interested in it, make sure you burn a CD and bring it with you when shopping, but to be honest, why on earth you’d choose something other than this little gem, I couldn’t guess.
Typically, the batteries last about 9 hours of continous use, but with the two power adapters that come with it, there is little reason to actually use the batteries unless you’re out hiking or something. And a 4 pack of batteries is small enough to bring easily along.
The bad part – Having used it extensively in the week I have owned it, I have noticed that when playing MP3s that it will randomly burp, sometimes dropping a second or so, and it sounds like a skip. Having backed up the CD just after this, I know it is not a defect in the CD itself. This could be because of the high speed that I record them at, I have not tried lowering the speed and seeing if it is the media itself that is giving the problem.
Another possibility of this could be the variable rate MP3’s I use, tricky for playing on my computer, much less a dedicated MP3 player. It tends to show up most when the MP3 file is in excess of 20 minutes long – I get a ‘skip’ about once or twice an hour.
All in all, this is the best device I have found, in a package that is quite attractive due to all the included componets, and is a MUST for anyone who has a CD burner at home, and likes to listen to audio books or music. A perfect father’s day gift or birthday present.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89.95
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Epinions.com ID:
OCBTracker
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Member: Gary Fuller
Location: Glendora, CA
Reviews written: 20
Trusted by: 3 members
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