It can be improved upon, but man I love this thing!
Written: Aug 12 '01
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Pros: Great sound. Line output All your favorite songs with you.
Cons: Doesn't like 700 MB discs. Not ergonomic
The Bottom Line: If you want to take your music with you, this it the way to go.
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| darksentinel's Full Review: Memorex MPD8505 Personal CD Player |
I only intended to purchase a plain old $30 CD player for my strolls in the park, but my wife knew that I wanted an MP3 player and, like all dream wives, forced me to buy the $79 Memorex MPD8505CP. I wanted a CD-based MP3 player because I didn’t want to pile dollar after dollar for a RAM-based MP3 player and still only have an hour or music at hand. If that’s all I can get from an MP3 player, why not use a cheap tape or a CD player, available everywhere? Well, the Memorex MPD8505CP holds up about 650 minutes of music (over ten hours) and it only cost me $79.
I’ve glanced at some of the reviews of this unit and I hope my perspective sheds some light on gripes. People have complained that the unit inexplicably skips on some MP3s. I believe I have an explanation for it. This seems to only happen with bigger MP3 files, the ones recorded at say 192 kbps and higher. The unit was probably designed to play 128k bit MP3s and under. Some of the MP3s I’ve downloaded were ripped at a whopping 320 kbps – plain overkill. The Memorex MPD8505CP unit probably works under the following assumptions:
1. Spin the CD
2. Read in x number of bytes of the MP3 and decode
3. Stop spinning the CD
4. Playback the MP3 until it has to read more
5. Read more in and go back to step one.
With a 255 kbps MP3, the unit reads in enough for what it thinks is a minute or so of music, but it decodes to only thirty seconds and before it’s ready, the buffer is empty, it has to read more. Whatever the problem, it’s a logical one. You’d do well to downsample your MP3s to 128kbps before you place them onto a CD for use with the MEMOREX MPD8505CP.
Speaking of playback rates, the unit does a better job of playing back 112 Kbps and 96 Kbps MP3s (which I would never create myself) than my software jukebox. It just seems less noisy. Granted, I am usually in a noisier setting (outdoors, with all its white noise) when I’m using this unit.
The unit boasts a 45-second buffer for CD music. This makes the unit great for joggers though if you persist in jostling the unit and never give it a chance to replenish its buffer, it will still skip or not play at all. I run up and down a hill on every lap. It seems to work fine for me.
It does play back your CDRWs, but keep in mind that it has consistently failed to read any 700 MB disk I’ve fed it so I stick to 650 MB. If you buy this unit, buy the 650s while they are hot. I’ve only tried to burn two 700 MB CDRs for it, both of them failing. I’ve re-written my 650 MB CDRW at least five times with no problem.
Why am I re-burning my RW? Well, with 130 songs online, I don’t have the time to search for the ones I want to hear. So every now and then, I refine the CD, killing songs I seem to always skip. That way I can leave it on random play more often.
The unit is not ergonomic, has no belt clip, strap, or grippers, and frankly it’s a nightmare to hold. You don’t want to drop it or compress the face while you’re carrying it. I have large hands. I and I stretch my fingers around the unit, holding it by its sides. I wish it had some sort of handle area or that I had some chest pocket to drop it in. The documentation warns you (almost screams at you) about dropping the unit, and makes me believe that they don’t have faith in its durability.
The unit conserves energy by spinning the CD only when it’s reading data. If you listen to the motor with the headphones off, you’ll hear the drive spin up and down. Still, the batteries don’t last as long as you might hope. Don’t get me wrong. Two AA batteries last me about a week of half-hour walks in the park and intermittent ventures to the store.
With well over 120 of my favorite songs on one CD, I travel with only one CD. I love this thing, and I rarely listen to the news anymore in my car. Understand that you can only use this unit as an MP3 player if you can burn your own data CDs. I have enough friends with unused CD burners to know that for some people this is akin to brain surgery. So if you are cyberphobic be prepared to at least create and rename some directories on your MP3 CDs
Directories are important because your MP3 CDs will play from directories in alphabetical order by:
1. Directories
2. Song names
So you can lay out your CD so that even without programming it, the first songs you hear are your favorite. Just remember the rules of alphabetization. Letters have more weight than numbers, so if you want everything in the ZimZam directory to play first, just name the directory 1 ZimZam and it moves to the top.
You might want to pay attention to the way you lay out your CDs, or at least the first directory, because the unit is very cumbersome when it comes to searching for songs. I’d pay $20 extra for one with a QWERTY keyboard or some sort of real menu instead of a display. The interface just plain sucks, and sometimes crashes (you just can’t get out of the text mode and operate it again without interrupting the power). It makes much more sense to me to just set it to random play and when it gets to the directory I want after five skips, set it to non-random play.
If your MP3s play back with cryptic looking names in the display, it means your MP3 tags haven’t been set. When you rip CD’s you should first let your ripper know at least the name of the album and the artist. I use MusicMatch and always get online when introducing a new CD to my system. The CDDB (CD database) automatically fills in all the songs.
AUDIO QUALITY
I know that there are some audiophiles out there who will trash this unit merely because of its low price. I’m not one of them. The only low marks I’ll give the unit are for its interface and the quality of the mediocre quality of the headphones.
The unit is almost dead quiet – at least in the settings I use it (car and outdoors), and has fantastic stereo separation. The sound quality of the MP3 playback is simply outstanding. The quality of audio CD play is somewhat louder than MP3 play albeit a bit coarser, what I expect from a cheap CD player. I have long found MPX playback superior to CDs. You will hear subtleties in MP3s that you won’t hear from normal CD players, especially in the area of stereo separation and intricate background sounds that you may have missed for years. This is because ripped MP3s are COMPLETELY decoded when played back. There is no low-quality skimming of the data like most CD players do these days. MP3s play back as they would from Rolls Royce CD player. If you don’t believe me, rip some MP3s at 128k bits and up and compare them to your original.
These days CD players are indeed a dime a dozen, and manufacturers feel they can trade a full frequency range for clean crisp distortion-free sound. There’s enough error correction (intended to ignore our smudges and scratches) built into the CD format to allow for bad, even defective media to be sold as gold, and low end audio units to be stamped “digital” and assumed cutting edge. Even my $200 CD burner’s audio playback quality pales to five year old 2x CD ROM that came in my kids’ computer. Frankly, your CD player is probably not an audiophile’s CD player, but when it rips, it rips verbatim, as slowly as it has to – no data lost or skimmed over or missed.
Overall, I love this unit. I plug it into my amplified speakers while doing the laundry and it rocks the house with no hint of a cheap sound. It can certainly be improved, especially with an internal rechargeable battery, access to 700 MB discs, bigger display, and a better user interface. But I still like it.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 79
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Epinions.com ID:
darksentinel
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Location: Shreveport, LA
Reviews written: 29
Trusted by: 0 members
About Me:
I arrived on earth, ten blocks from then toddler, Michael Jackson. He's somehow eclipsed me.
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