Decent device; poor usability
Written: Jul 24 '03 (Updated Jul 30 '03)
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Pros: Plays MP3's from CDR's and CDRW's; battery life; Decent display; EQ; Search function
Cons: Button layout; 30-45 second initial load-time
The Bottom Line: Great sound, durable, long life, poor usability
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| yuenp's Full Review: Memorex MPD8507 Personal CD Player |
OVERVIEW
My wife bought this unit for me as a Christmas present a couple years back. It's a great MP3/CD Player and has lots of options and extra hardware. My unit came with a tape adaptor, headphones and car charger.
The MP3 player has 40-second antiskip protection, pre-loaded EQ settings, MP3 file search, and a large LCD display that will show you file names, song titles, author, folder names, and live graphic EQ while in play.
The player is very sturdy and reliable.
The battery life varies, depending on the media you are using. MP3 disks will play for about 10 hours on a pair of alkaline AA batteries. If you are playing regular CD's your play time is decreased to around 5 or 6 hours.
I use NiMH rechargeable batteries in my unit. They've proven to be a good investment.
MECHANICS
The worst part about this CD player is the standard feature button layout. Looking at the player's buttons and button shapes, there are 4 silver buttons under the display. They're shaped as follows: left arrow, square, square, right arrow. Intuition tells you that the left arrow is reverse, the first square is play/pause, the second square is stop, and the right arrow is fast forward. Most portable CD players are laid out in that fashion... Memorex chose to layout the buttons in the following manner: play/pause, stop, fast forward, reverse. This means that the arrow pointing left is your play button, and the arrow pointing right is your reverse button. After a while, you get used to the button layout, but looking at the buttons and trying to figure them out is not intuitive and therefore very frustrating.
I'm not too crazy about the initial load time, either. I suppose it's pretty typical of mp3 cd players to require some indexing time at the beginning, but it can be a burden. When you hit the play button to start a new mp3 cd, you wind up waiting for about 30-45 seconds as the player indexes all of the files and folders on the disc before playing them. If you have your cd player in the car and it's a bumpy ride, the unit may NEVER start playing and will display a "disc error" message. The best way to get around this is to hold the player in your hand or place it flat on the seat next to you while it's indexing. This will ensure the shortest indexing/preload time. I keep mine vertical between the front seats.
Searching for files is another headache. The buttons are assigned 3-4 letters, similarly to a telephone. Typing in a name is also done in the same manner to a mobile phone: to type "cab" you have to hit the play button 3 times, wait, then hit it once, then wait, then hit it 2 times. Typing in a song title like "Whenever You're Near Me" is an all-day affair. Frankly, I never use the search feature just because it takes too long.
Another way to find songs on a disk is to stop the disk once it's started playing and press the "display" button. This will bring up a list of all the songs on the disk and you can easily progress forward and back through folders and file names and manually find what you're looking for.
While the CD will support folder structures on a disk, I've found that nested files tend to confuse the player. It's better to just have one folder for each Author or one per Album.
One other nice feature is that the MP3 decoder is pretty forgiving on bit-rates. Generally, CD quality bit-rates are encoded at 128-bit... one time I had more MP3's than would fit on a single disk. Using software, I cut the bit-rates down to 96-bit (which decreases the file size, but the sound quality degradation is nominal) before I burned the MP3's to a disk. They still sounded great on the player.
SCORE
8.4/10
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 89
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Epinions.com ID:
yuenp
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Location: Toledo, OH, USA
Reviews written: 15
Trusted by: 2 members
About Me:
Web Developer.
Enjoys video games.
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