Koss XJ300 Executive Microsystem

Rating:
Summary: Great System, Could Use Better Speakers
Review: I love this system! It's feature packed and looks great where ever you put it. I bought it mostly because I wanted a system that could play my MP3 cds as well as my purchased ones. It's great not having to use my computer to play loads of (my favorite) music on one disc. There is one thing I would like to point out, that the speakers are not as great as they could be. To tell you the truth, my computer speakers are better sounding than these (but then again, my pc speakers did cost me an extra $400. Klipsch Promedia 5.1 :-P ) and so I ended up using those speakers in place of the original Koss ones. Besides one drawback, I would definitely recommend this product to anyone looking for a system with MP3 playback capabilities for their home entertainment purposes. Otherwise, just get a portable cd-mp3 player and plug it into a powerful speaker system.

Rating:
Summary: Good player, could still use improvement on file access
Review: I've had my player for a little over a month now, and I am largely impressed. It plays CDRs, CDRWs and pre-recorded CDs all quite well, and the sounsd quality is exceptional. Finally I have something to listen to MP3s in my home with some decent quality without being anchored to my computer.

My initial shock was the size of the system - the central section shown in the illustration is not much smaller than a 15" monitor. As such, it does not fit on most bookshelves easily. Have someplace where you have a good 18" of depth available for the unit and all the speaker connections.

For MP3 recorded disks, read time is slow, sometimes up to 80 seconds. This is especially frustrating when you go to play the same disk a day later and have to wait again - you'd think the machine would remember.

The scrolling display indicates song title, and allows you to browse the other ID3 information fairly easily. However the display of any of these indicators appears to be limited to 16 characters, which often makes the feature largely useless, especially as the norm I've experienced is to reserve 5 characters of the title for the track number (i.e. "01 - track"). As many of the CDs I've burnt to MP3 are compilations, it would be nice to have a continuous scrolling track number/artist/title display a la Winamp, limited to at least 64 characters. Similarly it would be nice to be able to see the full Artist/CD Title info without the display cutting it off. That would be my ideal. Again, more on-board memory would help with this.

My biggest complaint, though, is with the tuner. It is simply not possible to manually tune a station without the remote. This is thoroughly inexcusable, and makes the egregiously ill-thought assumption that the remote is used regularly. A remote for a shelf system is almost as useless as one for a car stereo.