Home > Consumer Reviews > Genica GN803 Tavarua Portable MP3/CD Player

Right out of the box, the Genica was something of a disappointment. It did not recognize more than half the mp3s I'd burned to discs, and a quick read-through of the manual explained why.

1) CDRW is not supported. 2) Discs must be recorded using ISO-9660 or Joliet file systems, so if you're using Adaptec, you can't make use of the Direct CD function. This also limits the number of files in any given directory to 256. 3) You can't use larger capacity discs; 650 megs is the limit 4) The bitrates must be between 32 and 192 5) Playlist files are not supported 6) On a disc with mixed data types, only mp3s will be recognized. 7) No mp3 files following a non-mp3 file will be recognized.

It took me 3 tries to burn a disk on which most of the files were finally recognized. Then the beeping started. The disc would play without pause, but the "No disc" warning would show up repeatedly, accompanied by an annoying little beep that drowned out the music. A call to tech support confirmed that yes, it was odd, particularly as the beeping didn't seem to occur when I played regular CDs. However those produced a strange clicking noise at the start of each track.

I returned the unit to the place I originally bought it, (not Amazon.com, which will always be a lesson to me!) and instead of a replacement unit, I got a note from tech support saying that they couldn't find a problem and they were going to ship it back to me. So here's what I discovered when I got it back and ran my own tests:

Run the unit off of the AC adaptor and you'll probably have no trouble. Run it off of batteries and it will eventually start to skip and beep at you even though the disc is playing correctly. You get about half an hour to an hour's decent play out of a pair of double A batteries.

Don't EVEN try to burn discs for this puppy until you're sure you've got all the information down cold. You'll just waste blank discs.

Learn the controls; they are NOT intuitive and in fact can cause a bit of confusion.

Would I buy this unit again? No. Will it fit my needs until I can afford something better? Probably.

I had been looking for a machine like this. It seemed inevitable to me that this technology was right around the corner, but nobody seemed very anxious to get one on the market. I don't know the exact story behind this machine, but there are lots of machines out there that look exactly the same and come with the exact same accessories, but have different names on them. I think perhaps they were bought up from a manufacturer who went bankrupt??? Who knows why this phantom manufacturer disappeared? I do! This machine, called the Tavarua by Genica, is, as they would say in the military, a cluster foxtrot. I got it, put batteries in it and it played an audio cd fine. Great, but I didn't shell out samolians to play audio cd's. So I burned a CDR with mp3's on it. I put the CDR in the machine and pressed play. Now, it was sitting perfectly still on the table but you would have thought that I was using it to play ping pong while jumping up and down on a pogo stick during an earthquake. It wasn't so much the skipping that bothered me, but the annoying bursts of music that came in between the skips... So it skipped too much...the first thing I thought was, 'what am I doing wrong?' I thought perhaps I didn't burn the disc properly. So I read the manual that came with the machine... Calling it a manual is much like calling a fortune cookie a novel. The sparse manual assured me that I had encoded all the mp3's in line with the machines spec's... So I thought maybe the no name batteries I was using were the cause. So I used several different battery types listed in the manual. None seemed to work any better than any other. So I tried plugging it in with the adapter it came with and it played fine...for about 15 minutes until it shut down on its own for no apparent reason...upon checking it I noticed it felt much like I had just pulled out of the oven. So I unplugged it and let it cool off. That was the last time this machine ever worked. Needless to say, I sent it back. I would suggest nobody buy this machine...but oddly enough not for any of the reasons listed above. The biggest insult is...at this point Genica has not responded to any of my two dozen emails to tech support. I sent one asking if there is a way to minimize skipping...no reply. I sent one asking how to get the machine out of record mode as it was stuck even though the switch was on play mode...no reply No reply to the next 22 emails either... My only guess is that Genica did not reply becuase they knew that this was a poor quality machine and that nothing could be done about it... Can I prove that? No. But I can say that I will never ever purchase anything from Genica ever again because of their lack of response to my tech support questions.

I ordered one the day I knew about it. I was encouraged by an impressive review on ZDTV. But the product suffers from serious glitches. If you are lucky, it'll play for hours without a single skip. But then you are not so lucky all the time. I used it for almost a month because I was impressed by the idea of a MP3 cd player, and this was the only one in the market at that time. I'll give this product 4 stars for being the first of it's kind. But if you are considering buying one of these, I'd recommend that you go with a name brand like Philips, D-link or Memorex.

I've had one of these things for three weeks now, and have yet to persuade it to play more than 5 seconds of mp3.

Why YOU might care is because I'm a software engineer by trade, I know all about VBR, CBR, jitter, recording speeds etc ... and nothing helps.

On top of that, the design is clunky, the documentation is worse, and while it plays standard CDs fine most of the time, it's an AWFULLY expensive, inferior personal CD player.

Do yourself a favour and save your pennies until you can afford a hard drive mp3 player like the Creative Labs Nomad. My "Tavarua" is going back right now.

I've had mine for almost a year, and its till works. BUT, its cheaply made, has little to no control over the sound, or files.

Forget using this one at the gym. the 45 second shock protection seems to only work if the unit is flat. If you put it in a "tune belt" Forget about it.

Battery life is non-existent. We're talking 3-6 hours depending on the battery.

File control - There is none. Basic song skip and a directory skip that rarely works.

Audio quality - Weak. It doesn't play very loud, and the EQ settings are wortheless.

Now i use mine it at work, just hit play and listen to tunes all day though some cheesy PC speakers.

My vote, even with the new models. Wait until the technology is there. It won't be long.