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RCA RCD118 CD Boombox with AM/FM Tuner and MP3 Playback

RCA RCD118 CD Boombox with AM/FM Tuner and MP3 Playback

List Price: $119.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Built Like a Tank ......but equiped with a Yugo Engine
Review: Pros: Solidly Built, Has great folder, subfolder, file aqusition. Can select a folder and it will only play the songs in that particular folder. (set to file mode and it plays the whole disc) Sound is very good for a portable...has punch and plenty of power for playing outside at picnic or bar-b-que. The remote control is easy to use, as is the buttons on the machine itself.
Cons: Poor radio reception, even in large metropolitan area. Putting discs in is awkward..potential to scratch them if not done carefully...don't let the kids do it. MP3 tracking is fair to poor at best. If your discs aren't burned and finalized at 8x's speed or less expect skips. The display, while great, lacks a backlight..even though most ad's picturing this item appear to have a backlit display. For some reason this unit runs very hot...your discs are quite "warm" when you remove them.
The technology is out there to play mp3's without skipping...why rca didn't put more into their tracking lens with this unit baffles me, since they spared no expense in the materials for the cabinetry.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: "Skip" this MP3 Boombox
Review: Skips and chirps way too much. Very annoying! Repeats song phrases over and over and over. Has trouble sometimes locating MP3 songs and ends up playing the end of the previous MP3 song. Tried the same CD in another player and plays without any skips or chirps. It doesn't have a shuffle or random mode for your MP3's either. The FM signal is too weak. It's too bad that this is not a good product since it does produce decent sound quality.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not What You Expect!
Review: This system has trouble reading Mp3 CD's as well as commercial audio CD's. It lacks a shuffle feature for the MP3's which means you have to listen to 100 mp3 songs on your CD in alphabetical order. It's definately not what I expected and my expectations were high. I sent it back!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Not What You Expect!
Review: This system has trouble reading Mp3 CD's as well as commercial audio CD's. It lacks a shuffle feature for the MP3's which means you have to listen to 100 mp3 songs on your CD in alphabetical order. It's definately not what I expected and my expectations were high. I sent it back!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: "Skip" the reviews of people who don't read the directions.
Review: We've used this mp3 player for about a month now, and I probably wouldn't buy this product again. I have two major complaints:

1) The biggest complaint is that it skips on both regular CDs and MP3 CDs, even when it is just sitting on a desk. If you replay the song, it doesn't skip in the same place the second time.
2) MP3 song titles don't scroll on the the little display, you just see the first 10(?) characters, which on my MP3s is the album name, so I can't actually select a song by name.

Other less annoying issues include:
3) no shuffle play for mp3
4) Takes a long time to start playing a disk.
5) The CD-loading space is narrow; it's difficult to get the CDs in and out of the boom box without touching the bottom surface.
6) Another reviewer mentioned how hot the disks get in the machine. It just seems strange, and makes me wonder if we'll have reliability problems in the future.

Another reviewer claimed that "DirectCDs work", but this is only half true. You can put songs on a RW CD using Direct CD, then convert the CD to Regular CD format, but you can only do this one time per disk. The boom box can read only the first session on the disk (this is explained in the manual.)

With just a little more software work, I think RCA could have a great product here. It seems like they rushed this out to market.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Wouldn't buy this product again
Review: We've used this mp3 player for about a month now, and I probably wouldn't buy this product again. I have two major complaints:

1) The biggest complaint is that it skips on both regular CDs and MP3 CDs, even when it is just sitting on a desk. If you replay the song, it doesn't skip in the same place the second time.
2) MP3 song titles don't scroll on the the little display, you just see the first 10(?) characters, which on my MP3s is the album name, so I can't actually select a song by name.

Other less annoying issues include:
3) no shuffle play for mp3
4) Takes a long time to start playing a disk.
5) The CD-loading space is narrow; it's difficult to get the CDs in and out of the boom box without touching the bottom surface.
6) Another reviewer mentioned how hot the disks get in the machine. It just seems strange, and makes me wonder if we'll have reliability problems in the future.

Another reviewer claimed that "DirectCDs work", but this is only half true. You can put songs on a RW CD using Direct CD, then convert the CD to Regular CD format, but you can only do this one time per disk. The boom box can read only the first session on the disk (this is explained in the manual.)

With just a little more software work, I think RCA could have a great product here. It seems like they rushed this out to market.


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