A great player for a great price
Written: Apr 04 '01
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Pros: Alphanumeric display, reads CDRW, filename search, inexpensive, good anti-skip
Cons: Battery life, size, no hold switch, requires CD-R
The Bottom Line: It is a great purchase if shopping for an inexpensive MP3 player with a good feature set: it is the best MP3/CD player I have seen yet for under $200.
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| bigelephant's Full Review: Memorex MPD8505 Personal CD Player |
Most of the people getting into the portable MP3 player scene are frustrated with the players. Generally, portable MP3 players hold only one CD's worth of music at a very low bitrate/quality. Some have removable flash media, but it is ridiculously expensive at over $1/megabyte. On the other hand, blank CDs are cheap (approx. $.20 when bought in quantity) and have a great storage capacity - 10X more than even the largest flash card. CD-R drives are relatively common, as well. The Memorex player allows one to record their MP3 files onto a CD and play then on the go. It looks and works just like an ordinary CD player, but the size of the CD allows for recording of over 10 albums onto one disc when encoded into MP3, at an excellent bitrate which translates into good quality. The player is slightly larger than an ordinary CD player, but it is not unwieldy at all. The weight is the same as any other CD player. The button layout is slightly odd, but it is easy to get used to and is invaluable when entering alphanumeric characters for filename searching. One problem is that there is no hold key, so it is not very suited to being stored in a backpack. The ESP is excellent, with 45 seconds for music CDs and more than 100 seconds for MP3s (I could not get it to skip). The display is also a great addition as compared to similarly-priced products: it is 12 characters by 2 lines long and is capable of displaying ID3 tags or filenames. Most MP3/CD players at this price do not feature this capability. Although I have not tested it, it claims to support CDRW, and the maximum bitrate is well above the advertised 128 Kbps. My only real complaint is the battery life: it is well below modern CD players, at 4 hours (max). The player seems quite reliable, and the construction seems fairly solid, on par with regular CD players. Sound quality is pretty good and audible hiss is only noticeable between songs. However, DO NOT judge the sound quality or volume by the bundled headphones. They are bad and can not achieve high volumes. Get some higher-quality ones instead.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 99
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Epinions.com ID:
bigelephant
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Reviews written: 1
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