4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Works great for me.
Date of Review: Jul 23, 2002
The Bottom Line: For the money, I am very happy with the unit. It's intuitive in it's button designs and I'm going to get another one! (1 for car, 1 for home).
The unit was purchased from Fry's Electronic in Fremont, CA for $49.95. This package is not refurbished and came with just the earphone. (I know there were others that came with the car-kit but I didn't need that.)
The unit played all the MP3s and regular CDs as expected. Navigating folders is easy with it's own set of buttons. Tracks have their own set of buttons. Initial play takes about 15-30 seconds to start depending on how much music/sub folders you have on the CD-RW or CD-R. Regular CD starts right away.
Granted the screen does not have the folder title or the track name. I bought this unit so I can have 10 albums packed into one CD during long drives or provide background music at home. For that purpose, having to know which song/track/folder is not paramount. And for $50 I'm not complaining about that too loudly.
Sound quality, it all depends on which bitrate you rip your songs at. But it did handle 56 up to 196 quite well. Comparing between regular CDs on my HK vs. this unit, I can't tell the difference (ripping at 128).
There's extra bass boost button, multi-mode play (repeat 1, repeat all, random..etc), and ESP (skip protection which can be turned off in regular CD mode.)
One last note: the manual indicated specifically that Easy CD Creator's DirectCD feature is NOT supported.
So to get around that, just use Easy CD Creator's regular cd-creation method to burn tracks on a CD-RW or CD-R. I have had no trouble with CD-RWs with Easy CD Creator.
