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

Don't buy this unit. The claimed anti-skip feature doesn't work, whether you're sitting on your couch or driving in your car. The unit is also flimsy and cheaply put together. Memorex claims to have fixed the anti-skip problems in units manufactured after December 2000. Not so. I purchased mine from Amazon in June 2001, so even the units they're sending out right now haven't improved. Memorex has some work to do on improving this product.

One word Whoa! This CD player is just great, though it is a lil bulky comapierd to what im used to.(but that is b/c all I used before was sonys and they are smaller then most)This is a a great buy with a few minor flaws. It takes a while for each CD to load up, and it skips once in a while when playing MP3s.(this only happens with Higher bit rates i.e. 160<) Other then that I have had no probs with it.

I got this player yesterday, and so far it works great. Here's the pros and cons:

PROS:

-Great sound quality. Full deep, rich sound.

-Reads all my CDR's no problem.

-I can see ID3 tags.

-Comes with car kit and AC adapter.

-Light weight.

-Takes AA batteries, Alkaline and rechargeable.

-Shows Japanese text and special characters on display.

CONS:

-Skips a lot on some of my disks... maybe it's sensitive to certain color CD's or different writers... who knows.

-Sometimes chokes on an MP3 and stops playing sound. Requires user intervention to resolve.

-Cheap plastic casing.

-Too many buttons, and confusing navigation. Tough to find a particular song.

-Eats batteries. Buy some good NiMH rechargeables.

-ON MP3's, pauses between tracks, so if you have two that fade together, you'll get a cut in between. This is a function of MP3's in general, so don't expect to find a player that does this.

Overall a decent player.

I am absolutely disappointed with every aspect of this player. I am an engineer myself, and I agree with other reviewers that Memorex skip the testing phase of the design process. This unit is FULL of engineering flaws... What MP3 player can't support >128kps, or VBR??? I am more curious to know how Memorex designed the button-layout of this unit, did some just randomly picked out the position where each button goes? They are not friendly at all. This unit skips more often than a $15 cheap CD player, not because someone bumped it, but because of hardware/software bugs. And what a battery eater, a fresh set of Duracell Ultras, runs only about 3.5 - 4 hrs... My Panasonic CD player last 6 to 7 times longer on a same set of battery. This unit looks cheap, cost cheap, and performs cheap as well... I guess you do get what you pay for. I'd stick with my solid-state MP3 players for now!

My criteria for a decent mp3/cd player is something that supports ID3 tags (shows title/artist/album info if it was encoded in the mp3), a good button interface that is usable when you can't really look and read each button, something that doesn't skip like mad.

This player fulfills all of those and here were the drawbacks I've seen: no backlight for its display (something that I'm positive Memorex will fix in the next model), the search function hasn't worked for me at all yet though other people report it, it does skip occasionally but it's not enough to bother me plus I think some of it is a problem with mp3 itself as one of the worse skips happened twice, both on the same song in I think the same place!

Also, the player doesn't resume when its been powered off and it'll power off on its own in what seems to be less than 5 minutes which is a bit of a pain to me because I'll stop it so I can talk to someone but I want to be able to hit the resume button within say 15 min and have it resume immediately. But in the end, it's better that it powers off on its own because your batteries won't get worn down as much via accidental power ups if something hits the play button. My wish: a longer "idle" period.

Bottom line, I think when you read the other people's reviews it becomes clear that a lot depends on how well you burn the cds in the first place. And when you compare this to the Phillips boxy player & the other few players out there, it's really very much better because most of the others don't have ID3 support and many have very difficult to use button interfaces (too close together). And considering that this is available at about half the price of the Phillips machine which fails on both ID3 & usable interface.... it's the best machine if you want something NOW

Sure this isn't the best possible player but the problem is that that player hasn't been BUILT yet. I really do think that for all the pros that this player has in comparison to the other players, it's worth dealing with a few cons, some of which you can overcome yourself.

So personally.. I still need to experiment with burning cds because I did it using what other people said not to which is probably why the search function isn't working for me.

I want to offer this experience ... on the same CD which contains 189 tracks, I'd get varied "read track" reports. If I let it just load and count them without interference... I'd get a count of 187 and it would start playing on the 34th song. If I immediately set the "play mode" to Random when I powered on, it'd start playing within a few seconds and the track count would vary greatly. So obviously, the player isn't reading two of the songs and if you don't let it just do its thing when you turn it on, it won't read the CD fully.