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iRiver iMP50 MP3 / CD Player with Car Adapter

iRiver iMP50 MP3 / CD Player with Car Adapter

List Price: $79.99
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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very Nice Product!
Review: I had a RioVolt SP90 for about 2 years now, still works great too, gave it to my brother, and i was in store to buy a new one.

After going through a ton of reviews for products, i came upon this, and at that excellent price, and all the positive comments here, i decided to choose this one.

Let me tell you, this thing is great! You get alot of options to tinker with, which are all easy to navigate thanks to the very detailed User Manual. It plays everything i've thrown at it so far, as far as Bit Rates are concerned. Nice volume too, my RioVolt didn't get very loud, this thing does though. I also upgraded to the 1.10 version firmware right away.

My only real gripes are the fact that the supplied ear buds suck (i have studio headphones i use anyway, so no big eal there). Also the car adapter doesn't come with the power plug, i wasn't planning on using the player in a car though (i have a Pioneer MP3 player in my car). Another couple minor things was the fact that the folder name doesn't scroll during playback, there's no backlight for the LCD, and you gotta load CD's in the bottom of the player is kinda wierd.

Well, in conclusion, this is WELL worth what there asking, a very nice MP3 player, no doubt. They coulda offered an AC Adapter along with it, but those can be easily purchased at Radio Shack for like $5. The cons are very little when compaired to the pros, i'm not gonna get into grave detail on the features, the supplied reviews covered all those pretty much.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Clean Sound For the price
Review: To start with I dont use the headphones that comes with it...I use it with sennheiser evolution headphones. Compared with panasonic this is really better. The sound is crisp and clear. The volume levels it supports are good this is important since most other manufacturers dont have it to save battery life. Easy to operate (i didnt open the mannual till now). Display is better than many others (lil cluttered though) but definately informational.
Coming back to sound. Bass is good. Treble is even better.
Things that go against...CD insertion if at the bottom (takes getting used to). Does not come with the car power adaptor.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Decent quality
Review: It's been almost a month since we own this player.
It'll do everything it advertise it doing. It'll play MP3 CDs, Audio CDs and so on. In its daily use, it didn't skip at all. From the home-made CDs, it seems that it prefers the blue surface over any other colour.
My biggest complaints about this player are:
1) headphones are of medium to good quality (lack of bass frequencies)
2) because of this you actually do not hear the unit distorting sound over a certain level. Use of very good headphones makes distorsion clear (as also playing the unit through a powered amplifier)
3) complete lack of LINE OUT. This would eliminate / attenuate the distorsions above, and would make it easier to hook it up to the car's stereo (via included cassette adapter)
4) misleading run time on batteries. Although I believe their claims to be correct, people would be more interested in knowing playable time with good quality MP3 CDs (like 128kbps or above). Using this format, battery time is about 2 to 3 hours (average) with 4 hours peaks (I use Duracell 1.8 amperes rechargeable batteries). The battery indicator is of almost no use, as it recomputes its bar-level after each disk spin (read after each song). So, all of a sudden you'd have 1-2 bars when previously you had 3-4. Then, complete silence...
5) ergonomics: folks who designed the placement of the buttons probably never used the layout. The close proximity of Rev and Fwd to Play / Stop is confusing, as is the similarity in shape. There's nothing helpful about taking the standard WinAmp buttons layout and arranging it in a circle, except that's probably very cheap to shape. A better idea would have been to separate buttons by function (for instance Rev / Fwd in one place and Play / Stop in another).
For the money, this is an average unit. I would not buy one again, mostly because of the sound quality if anything else. It's not bad, but leaves a lot to be desired. Strangely, in the digital era I guess we are no longer used to think in Hi-Fi terms, and this is definitely not one of those.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Overall value for money, not all good though
Review: Pros:
Excellent user menu. Nice customizations. Upgradable.
Excellent battery life.
Nifty features. Check product description for features. Stands up to description.

Cons:
No backlit LCD. Blind at night.
CD loads on reverse side. Can get pretty clumsy to change CDs.
Some MP3 CDs take a long time to load.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Not for Jogging
Review: I bought the iRiver iMP50 for jogging. The anti-skip doesn't work well at all. Don't buy it for jogging.

I tried CD-R, CD-RWs, and regular CDs. Despite the anti-skip settings that I tried, it would not play more than about 5 mins without starting to skip. Then it never recovers properly. Even if I held it fairly still, a technique that works great with my 4-year old Panasonic player, it just continues to skip, play a second or two, then skip some more. In order to get it playing again, I had to stop completely and hold it perfectly still, or better yet, turn it off, then back on. Then it will play for another 5 mins (or 2 mins for regular music CDs).

Menu system is confusing. It takes a while to get used to, but if it would just work properly while jogging, I'd put up with that.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great Player for Audiobooks
Review: This player is the greatest player at the best price for audiobooks. It remembers exacly where you turned it off for the last 10 disks left in the player. Plays from 8Kbit to 196 Kbit MP3s.

Love this player, would have payed a lot more for it.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Not bad!
Review: I bought this a week back. It had been working fine ever since! But today one of the head phone piece came off....so I just have one :-( They say it has a warranty; writing to them today. Lets c.Abt the batteries, i must've used it for close to 7 hrs...and haven't replced them as yet - I only played mp3's. As of today I feel the deal is good - cos from best buy for panasonic you pay $60 but it doesnt have the skip facility. Audio quality is good, havent used any toher features as yet..need to read the manual and start on that! More later

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Suprised
Review: I was shopping for a new mp3 player, but all the hard drive models have had such bad reviews about drive crashes. That left me with buying another flash memory model or a CD/CD-R/CD-RW model. I also needed the device to play WMA files.

For the price I figured I would give the iriver a shot. This thing has lots of great features for the price. Well worth it.

The construction could be a little more sturdy feeling. I don't want to know what is going to happen if I ever drop this thing. Other than that, I have been VERY happy with this product.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: You get what you pay for!
Review: I've had this player for about a week now and I must say... you get what you pay for! I would have given it no stars if I had that option! Sound quality is not very good! This player would be pretty good if it was free like something you get out of a box of cereal. Don't waste your money on this player! Get something a little bit more expensive! Needless to say I'm very disappointed in this purchase. I ALMOST FORGOT...IRIVER DO NOT HONOR THEIR REBATES!

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Solid product, nice price.
Review: This product (unlike others I've tried) does not skip when walking with it. True, the bottom feels a littly flimsy, but trust me this player will not open up or come loose. I've carried it around with me, and sometimes I keep it in my bag's front pouch...the headphone cord is just long enough for that.

pros:
-plastic body wont show scratches
-the player is very light, makes it easy to carry!
-the display is very informative...birate, track name, battery life and so many other options I've yet to master
-the size is also compact..too me, smaller then it looks in the picture (comparing it to my sony psych it's smaller and lighter)
-reads mp3 cds flawlessly and is pretty quiet too
-firmware upgradable (and very easy to do, just download from www.iriver.com and burn the 'hex' file onto a blank cd or cdr...this feature is good because as formats change in feature iriver will be on top of it
-comes with ear buds (average, nothing to write home about)
just to clarify, the headphone cord length is supposed to be one long and one short cuz you put the left cording around the back of your head so nothing dangles in front of you...it prevent tangles and is actually really cool..I just can't get the darn ear buds to stay in properly
-comes with car adapter (I have no interest in using this..but FYI does not come with the power charger, just the cassette thing (so you'd have to buy a power adapter or run on AA batteries in the car)
-has 1 year warranty...pretty decent
-comes with 2 AA duracell batteries

cons
-no AC power adapter to run it on at home (FYE sony AC 4.5V adapter works fine with this player, I have one from my sony portable cd player)...at ... it's around $
-no backlight...I know they did this to cut costs, but I would have liked it
-earphones are not too comfy in my ears and sound is nothing more then average (plan to upgrade)...
-LCD scratches easily (mine had small scratches out of the box..but nothing major

For amazon's sale price, this player does the trick. On mp3 cd's you can fit somewhere between 150 to 200 songs depending on the quality/file size...and I don't use wma but you can fit more using that format

Update: Battery life is acceptable. Seems to last between 10-12 hours...I don't think it's really the 16 advertised, but products always overshoot battery life. I am probably going to buy NiMH batteries because of the fact it's cheaper to recharge, then to keep buying batteries. With fairly regular use you'd be changing them at least once a week. Still a solid product. I run it from an AC adapter when I am doing hw at night. No problems like other ppl stated. And the battery indicator is in fact fickle (as one review says). It says the battery is fully charged when I know it isn't and then it indicates suddenly the battery is nearly out. This is the only flaw on the player, if it's even a big issue. Carry a spare set of batteries anyway. This player does not skip when the battery is low (someone else experienced this)...it plays fine until battery drains.

Hope this helps.


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