Home > Consumer Reviews > JVC XL-MC334BK 200-CD Changer

Nice component, excellent sound, but the excessive motor noise when searching for a disk really detracts from the overall quality. Also missing is the ability to show time remaining on a track. Otherwise, nice affordable choice.

Aside from the fact that as soon as the warranty expired the CD player started jamming often, I was disappointed with it from the beginning. Although one can categorize each CD by genre one can't have the player play a random selection of a particular genre which makes the random function rather useless it's difficult to have a dinner party and have the CD player skip from Miles davis to Red Hot Chilli Peppers to Chopin. These days there are players with even larger capacities. One can do better...

OK, so in the overall scope of gadgets, this is not the most feature-rich, or technologically advanced, but for this price, WHO CARES! First of all, it's JVC, and as usual the sound quality is second to none. Secondly, it has a LOT of features for the price. It even allows you to label each disc with a text description of the CD, so if you have 200 discs (or less), or intend for some of your discs to permanently live in the player, it's extremely easy to navigate. You can also pick up to 32 discs of the 200 in the player as your favorites, and create your own "channels" to play on either continuous or random play. I've had the player for a few months now, and there are times we have it playing for 12-14 hours straight (weekends/spring cleaning) and it keeps going & going with no problems, few repititions of a disc, and NEVER repeats a song in a single sitting. Finally, the remote is extremely easy to use, works from about 20 feet away, and fits in most regular sized pockets. If you're in the market for a multi-disc changer, you won't find a better candidate.

The XL-MC334BK CD Changer is a nice product at a really good price. It works good, the only drawbacks are the inability to play random within groups of CD's and the lack of an RS232 interface to load all of the CD title,author,track etc info. It plays CDR's just fine, the person who said it doesn't is absolutely WRONG.

This player is a great way to organize your CD collection, and its wonderful to have 200 CD's at your fingertips! However, based on my experiences with this player, I wouldn't recommend this player, and here's why:
1.) Too many moving parts inside the player. Not only does this make changing CD's very noisy, it increases the likelihood of failure. After owning this model for 3 years with hardly any problems, one day it quit playing CD's. After opening the cabinet, I discovered the problem was a mechanical failure was causing the CD's to not completely fall into place to play. So now no CD's will play unless you manually force them into place.
2.) The random function is very poor. Even if you have the player completely filled with CD's, the random function will always choose the same 15 or so CD's. The player also doesn't remember which tracks have already played, so it will often choose the exact same song within a few minutes of each other! With literally thousands of songs to choose from, this is simply unacceptable.
3.) When you're filling this player with CD's for the first time, be prepared to invest A LOT of time if you want artist/album details entered. There is no keyboard input on this player. All info must be entered by choosing a letter, pressing enter, moving the wheel to the next letter, pressing enter, and so on. I spent several hours entering this info when I first bought the player. Very tedious.

If you own a lot of other JVC equipment, this player may be worth it since its very compatible via the CompuLink system. Everyone else, like me, should move on to something else.