Home > Consumer Reviews > Memorex MPD8505CP Personal CD/MP3 Player with 45 Seconds of Anti-Skip Protection

When I saw this unit advertised on Amazon I thought "great price" for a MP3/CD player. Unfortunately, the unit did not live up to my expectations. It is heavier and bulkier then it needs to be, and the construction seems flimsy. The MP3 functionality is extremely picky in terms of files and CD's that it will read. First I thought it was me, but after reading other people's experiences I realized it was the unit. Manual is worthless, and the manufacturers web site offered no help. I returned the player and invested a little more in the Sonicblue Rio Volt. Boy am I happy I did! The unit does everything the Memorex could not, even the sound was better. It's true - you get what you pay for!!

I have been sitting here reading all of the different reviews and a person who is considering buying this thing would certainly leave confused. Well I am writing this review to clear the confusion, this is not a good unit. As other people have said it takes a long time for the unit to read all the tracks on the CD in MP3 format approx 30-45 seconds. This unit is plagued with engineering problems because it does not do anything consistently. When playing a song sometimes it pauses for about 1-2 seconds during a song. I also do not like the fact that everytime you power the unit down it starts over from the VERY beginning and you have to hit the skip button to get back to where you were. Also I wonder if anyone has experienced this problem...sometimes on random mode when the laser is searching for the next track it powers off completely. But you turn it back on and its fine. I have the Manufactured in October 2000 Suffix A, but its still plagued with problems which I consider to be unacceptable. Sound quality is not crisp and smooth like when you play a file from your computer to your stereo. Its difficult to describe but like digital artifacts when there is a quiet part in the music. I would pass on this one.

I've finally made the commitment and entered into the world of portable MP3 players; I absolutely recommend it to anyone with a CD recorder. At 650mb of memory, it's an unbeatable bargain. And with the ability to also play CD-RW's, there's nearly infinite ways to arrange your music on this gem. I shopped endlessly for an affordable MP3 player, but I was reluctant to pay for a measly 32mb-64mb.

The playback quality may not be the same as your regular CD player; that's the nature of MP3's and compressed music. And the trade off is well worth the slight loss of perfection. Most people won't even notice the difference.

The player itself seems a little flimsy, but it has worked flawlessly. The controls are confusing, and the instructions hardly help. Once you get used to it though, the ability to read a song's title in its ID3 tags is a lifesaver. I can't imagine searching through over 150 songs on a disc without the ability to read the song's title. I also organized my CD's into about 15 directories, and named each directory a genre of music or an album title.

I have a first generation iMac (rev. A), and a Sony USB Spressa CD-RW. I'm also using Memorex CD-RW's and have had none of the problems mentioned in all of the other reviews. Memorex has made a solid, cheap MP3 CD player. It's not perfect, but it does work.

Ok, I got the dreaded "Suffix A" model, and it's working great! VERY VERY VERY GOOD Sound Quality... Non-Distortionate Bass Boost, Very good Anti-shock (I shook it for 2 minutes without it skipping). Every once in a while there is a "misread" on the CD, probaby due to the new supersensitive laser catching dust or something, it just puts a glitch or a speaker pike in the song, that doesn't happen often though, depends upon the song. With CD-RWs, it's a little more picky, sometimes it will play a song flawlessly, sometimes it wont... still havn't figured that one out yet... may have to do "full format" on those discs. The manual says filenames with odd characters might not be recognized, so far it's recognizing them fine for me. Next thing is battery life.. I'm clocking 3-hour battery life on 10 year old rechargables, the manual says 6 hours, but I'm happy with 3, between the AC house power adapter, and the DC car adapter, even these batteries are going to last a long time. I was a little disappointed by the LCD, it does do everything they say, but they cram it into 2 lines, and the songname scroll is S...L...O...W. Oh yeah, the other thing that bugs me, is that when you turn it off, it loses all the settings, ie: Playmode (Repeat/Random), Resume (forgets what song you played last..), ESP setting (can't turn it off for MP3 cds, just Audio CDs). The manual is a bit skimpy, it doesn't tell you the details, it says it'll do 96-192kbps, I've clocked it at 32-320 with no skips (same song to test all the bitrates) It says nothing about having to be in ISO9660, it reads long filenames just fine, (well, the first 8 characters, anyway :) This unit (so far as I can tell) can read every mp3 cd I've tested it on, it'll ignore other data (non-.mp3, which is a problem with some other mp3 players.) The only difficulty I've come across is that it will only recognize the first 200 songs, then stop.

Antishock=Good,
Sound Quality=Good,
Manual=OK,
Text Search=you gotta fiddle with it for a bit to get the hang of it, it's OK,
LCD=OK-not backlit,
Directory Tree=Good,
resume=skips to start of song, and is forgotten if turned off, which makes it kind of obsolete, but it's ok,
play modes=Good,
accessories=Good,
bass boost=Good,
battery life=Good,
userfriendly=Fiddle with it until you figure it out.

If you can put up with a glitch every once in a while, then this is the player for you, cheap, rich sound quality, not bad looking...

This was more than I had expected for what I paid for, I'm a very happy customer...

After reading some of the reviews, I cautiously bought this product. My expectations were lowered but I was pleasantly surprised. My old CDRW that I burned over several times with 140 MP3's worked just fine in the player. It had a few distorted scratchy sounds (1 per song) in some of the files I had downloaded but the files I made from my own CD's were perfect. This appears to the way they were generated. All my files are 128 or 192 bps. It read the MP3 tags fine so I could tell what the songs were by title. I didn't bother to rename any file names and it handled them just fine. I would recommend reading the manual though - it takes a little learning to use the search functions which are not as easy as they could be. But for what I want this for, which is a ton of good quality music in my car, this is a reasonable product. A ton cheaper than an MP3 player.