Buy only for its MP3 performance.
Written: Mar 19 '02
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Pros: great MP3 performance, good battery life, easy navigation
Cons: horrific audio CD (CDDA) performance
The Bottom Line: Although I recommend this player for MP3 CDs, I give it only an 'average' rating because of its abysmal audio (CDDA) performance.
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| mssymrvn's Full Review: TDK MOJO Personal CD Player |
I bought this player because I thought I'd get the best of both worlds: MP3 CDs for long-play mixes and audio CDs for the bulk of my CD collection. I thought about getting a hard-drive based MP3 player but didn't want to foot the bill and then not be able to play my audio CD collection.
When the player arrived I used MP3 CD almost exclusively for the first couple of weeks. Flawless. The interface was intuitive and I only had to refer to the manual once or twice for play list editing. The construction is solid, I don't feel like it's going to break in my hands like most portable CD players. The headphone output is clean and can drive my Sennheiser headphones without problems. And skipping is more or less unheard of. Then again, the player spends most of its time sitting on my desk at work, plugged into the wall so I've not really put this thing to the test.
Then I finally started playing audio CDs. Forget it. Don't bother unless you like to be frustrated. The Mojo can't play audio CDs with any sort of reliability. You'll never know exactly which discs will exhibit poor behavior. This player skips in random places, often can't find the end of one track and the start of another, and also takes to fits of just ending the disc play early.
The skips show up on discs without scratches. Both pre-recorded discs and CD-Rs. It doesn't matter. Sometimes a disc will play flawlessly. When you play the same CD again later on it will skip without provocation and skip often. There's really no recourse but to skip to the next track.
The player also can't seem to find the track markers. It is not infrequently that one track finishes playing but then just keeps producing silence with the elapsed time increasing without end. The song is finished but the player seemingly can't find the end of the track and just plays silence. Re-playing the same track often results in perfect performance though. So it's not a scratch or bump on the disc.
Finally, the player also seems to like to quit early. As if it's 4:00pm on a Friday and it's time to go home. The Mojo just stops playing and shuts down. No reason. And playing the same disc again or the same track results in perfectly good behavior. Subsequent plays sometimes exhibit the broken behavior again and sometimes things work just fine. It's completely random.
Now mind you, this broken behavior only shows up with audio CDs, not MP3 CDs. But c'mon, this is supposed to be a portable MP3 AND CD player, not just an MP3 player. But as it stands now, don't bother with audio CDs - this player can't handle them very well.
It might be that I got a bad player, but there are one or two others over at Amazon.com who have seen this behavior so I don't think it's just a fluke.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 120
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Epinions.com ID:
mssymrvn
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Reviews written: 1
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