Sima IM-120 I-Mix Digital Audio Recorder and CD Player

Rating:
Summary: Great Idea - Bad Controls
Review: I bought this unit from the manufacturer as soon as it came out. I did the same with the Compressor Personal Jukebox. These hard-drive based players are a quantum leap forward. Amazingly, the much-smaller portable unit has far more comprehensible software, and is a breeze to use. The Sima's remote is hard to read, and has to be pointed right at the player. It should allow you to just type in what you want to hear, select a playback mode, and get on with it. Instead, there are a bunch of steps that are very confusing at first or after a long absence. Uploading music is not hard, though I found most album info had to be downloaded from the Internet connection, which for some bizzare reason did not work on my desktop, but worked fine on my laptop. Go figure. I used this gizmo to copy most of my CD collection to take to my country home, and it is a great innovation. The company has told me they will copy the hard disk onto another unit for me if I want, saving the trouble of doing all the loading again if I want to get another unit with all my music on it for another location. That's cool! A good unit for the patient person with good eyesight! (They should make the unit recognize CD's automatically and save the time & effort!)

Rating:
Summary: Great idea and good execution
Review: What a great idea! Hundreds of your albums recorded onto this unit's hard drive and never mess with them again. It actually works - the IM-120 records a whole CD in about 10 minutes and it sounds good! It can record at 128kbps, 320kbps, or CD quality but the 320kbps sounds perfect!

That display! That remote! For such a cool piece of hardware the main unit's display and the remote display are really hard to read. They get the job done, though - just have patience and let each keystroke complete. The remote's display is dim and the keypad seems a bit cheap.

The IM-120's CD database is impressive - I've not had any CDs that are not in it, and I've loaded about 150 CDs. The CD player is quiet playing regular CDs but is kind of noisy when high-speed archiving.

For its original list price ..., this was a cheaply-constructed, not-quite-ready-for-prime-time item, but for ...(Amazon's price) it is a cool repository for my CDs, if you can deal with some quirks.