Good value, could have been better thought-out
Written: Jan 25 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Good sound, light and compact, long battery life, uses cheap media.
Cons: Weak navigation, earphone jack placement.
The Bottom Line: Excellent choice for portability, sound quality and unlimited storage for a low price; Gadget freaks with deeper pockets who want it all might want to keep looking.
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| enidq's Full Review: Teac MP330 Personal CD Player |
When looking for a portable MP3 player I considered units with flash memory and units with an internal hard disk. I didn't consider miniCDs until I took this off the shelf and thought about it.
The trouble with flash memory storage is that you're constantly going back to your PC to change the playlist -- with miniCDs, you burn them once and use them forever. Plus you can play them in your computer as well.
185 megs means that at 128Kbps you can pretty easily get 3 audio CDs onto a single miniCD. This will reduce a very large music collection to a manageable number of discs. One negative is the comparative shortage of miniCD accessories: there aren't many cd portfolios (CompUSA has an own-brand 24-disc model) available in stores and I've yet to find anything but slim jewel cases available in bulk... and you can forget about storage racks.
The sound quality is more than good enough, the skip protection is effective if you're not using it for a football.
As for battery life, I haven't used the included alkaline AAs -- but a pair of 1800mAh NiMHs seem to be good for about 6-8 hours per charge. If you use rechargeables you will need an external charger -- the included AC adapter will only power the device, not charge the batteries.
In day-to-day use there are two negatives:
First, it would just about fit (snugly) into an average shirt pocket... except for one thing: they placed the headphone jack on the side, so with the headphones plugged in it the unit is effectively a half-inch wider: too wide for any shirt pocket I have. For this reason, the back would have been a much better place for the jack. Given that it lacks a belt clip or any provision for one, this means if you're not wearing a jacket, you'll be carrying it in your hand.
Second, although it can seemingly handle any file/folder structure you decide to use on your CDs, the navigation is straight out of Audio-CD-Land: skip forward, skip back, and that's it. Getting to the fifth song on the third album involves pressing the skip button many, many times.
Other than that, it's a little slow to initialize: when you change discs, or it's been stopped for a while, it spends a good five seconds reading the directory information before you can start playing.
The LCD display is clear and readable in any light, but since it only displays track and title numbers, you'll still be navigating by ear most of the time.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
enidq
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Reviews written: 1
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