Slick little mp3 player.
Written: Dec 18 '01
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Pros: small size, good battery life, wide mp3 bitrate support.
Cons: no id3 support, no wma support
The Bottom Line: I would say that this player is the best 8cmCD/mp3 player currently on the market. It beats current competitors and will last you until there is one with ID3, etc.
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| keisler's Full Review: Teac MP330 Personal CD Player |
In considering buying a portable mp3 player I considered three types: full-size 12cm CD players, memory based players, and 8cm CD players. I found 12cm CD players too bulky and I didn't need THAT much music on one cd. The point of the mp3 format is being smaller, right?
So I looked at memory players. The bottom line with that is that memory is just too expensive for these, especially compared to CD-R's.
So I came to look at 8cm CD mp3 players. I happened upon the Teac last as it is the newest at this point. It's main competitor at this time seems to be the phillips Expanium 401. The Teac has longer playing time thanks to taking two AA batteries instead of just one (why have just one? Dumb on Phillip's part). The literature says 6-7 hours on one set of batteries for the Teac.
It also has physical and electronic skip protection. When I first got it, I loaded up a cd and ran around the room and then stood there and shook it up and down and side to side - no skips. I was impressed. An 8cm CD seems easier to physically keep from skipping since its edges are closer to its center of gravity.
The headphones are earbuds and are so-so. I have come to expect not getting decent headphones with a portable player. That's fine with me since most people that are picky would want to pick out their own headphones they like anyway.
The player does not support ID3 tags. If you don't know, an ID3 tag is a "tag" included in a MP3 file that identifies the song, artist, and other info. Some mp3 players are able to read this info and display it on its LCD. This would be a very nice feature to have. However, the MP-330 does support titles and tracks. This means you can put groups of songs onto a CD-R in directories and the player will interpret each directory as a separate "title" or album. This allows you to break up the music into groups on the cd rather than just having 50-60 songs all in one big mess.
The manual is pretty crappy and only explains simple stuff. What I really wanted it to explain was how it handled titles and tracks that I just mentioned above. I wasn't sure if it read the ID3 tags in the files and organized them according to that without actually being able to display the verbage or if it read directories as titles. In the manual is mentions "tagging" the tracks to put them into a desired order, which is confusing. Also, it reads files in alphabetical order. So, if you want your tracks in a specific order you should prefix the names of the tracks with a two digit number (01, 02, etc).
The case looks somewhat cheap and flimsy. There are button on the edges for bass and hold mode. It has held up fine so far, however.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 122
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Epinions.com ID:
keisler
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Reviews written: 1
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