Nice while it lasted
Written: Jun 01 '03
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Pros: Price, Usability / Track Navigation
Cons: Reliability, Power
The Bottom Line: Despite appealing price and ease of use, look upscale for reliability.
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| mkidd's Full Review: Audiovox MP-3510 Car CD/ MP3 Player |
I enjoyed this product while it lasted and even recommended it to friends. But 18 months after purchase the CD read head failed without any sign of trouble beforehand, reducing it to an expensive radio. Naturally, the warranty period is one year, but Visa's extended warranty picked up the estimated repair cost which I'm going to apply toward a similar product from a different manufacturer.
The Jensen MP3510 wins on price. For typical factory speakers and average car noise, the Jensen isn't the weak link. It sounded fine both in an old Nissan Pulsar with plenty of rattles and a new Acura RSX with a fair bit of road noise. However, while 4 x 45W is enough power for most purposes, you can't really blast this thing.
The usability was very good. It was easy to remember all the features and easy to navigate to the appropriate folder or track within a folder without taking your eyes off the road. I hope to do as well for its replacement. Volume, bass, treble, balance, and fade are all selected by repeatedly pressing a single Selection button in the middle of a four way arrow navigation button group. This is easy to remember and keeps the faceplate clutter free.
The MP3510 organizes tracks alphabetically within each folder on each CD. Therefore, tracks should be named with a track number prefix, e.g. "01 - Brilliant Corners.mp3". Folders are also organized alphabetically. Folder navigation moves forward or backward one folder and starts at the first track in the folder. Track navigation moves forward or backward one track in the folder skipping to the next or previous folder if at the end or start of a folder respectively. Tracks are also indexed linearly for the entire CD and can be selected directly, e.g. track #135. The player reads the ID3v1 tag and can display either the album, track, artist, or the folder name.
Any MP3 product will have a few annoyances. Mostly this is just due to the number of possible features. The following bugged me.
1. No fast forward or fast backward. Yeah, this is a bit tricky to implement, especially with VBR encoded MP3s. But even something simple like skipping forward / backward by 200 kbytes / press would be convenient.
2. Slow startup scan if the CD contains lots of files. Before the MP3510 will play an MP3 CD, it scans all the files on the CD looking for MP3s. Normally, this only takes a couple of seconds. But add 3000 HTML files related to the music on the compilation and now the file scan takes two minutes. I suspect the player scans all files regardless of extension to see if they might contain MP3 data. I'd rather it only scanned files with standard MP3 extensions, like .mp3.
3. Ignores ID3v2.2/2.3 tags. Since the ID3v1/1.1 fields like track name are limited to 31 characters, the player with only show 31 characters of truncated information even if the full information is present in an ID3v2.2/2.3 tag.
4. Does not support the full Latin-1 character set, which includes most characters with diacritics, e.g. vowels with umlauts. These characters are replaced with an underscore in the display. Not surprisingly, greek, hebrew, arabic, and other common Unicode code pages are not supported either. (note: the ID3v2.2/2.3/2.4 standard explicitly supports Unicode).
5. Limited vertical viewing angle. It is hard to read the display in the Acura because the receiver mount is at a 45 degree angle.
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 200
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Epinions.com ID:
mkidd
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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