Home > Consumer Reviews > Memorex MP3123 CD Boombox with MP3 Playback

Tried this in a store with two ordinary MP3 CDRWs (both burned at 4x speed). Neither was recognized as an MP3 CDRW - the unit just sat there, mute.

(Playing back MP3 CDRWs is pretty much all that I would do with a unit like this, so I didn't test the other functions very much. The radio seemed to work well.)

The search for a boombox that works as well as the Rio Volt line of personal players moves on...

I was looking at this item at Radio Shack for the last few weeks, and it went on sale for twenty dollars off. So I had the clerk plug it in and I popped in a MP3 OTR disc I was listening to on a RioVolt SP50 with earphones.
Bottom line; It played the mp3s ok as far as I could tell, and I didn't expect it to display the title artist and album information, despite the fact that my thirty dollar mp3 Riovolt does.....It did list the directory number and file number, but that was a bare minimum needed to play a mp3 cd. It has a nice blue backlight..It worked ok but I don't know if it has any anti skip buffering, but only an issue here in earthquake prone San Francisco...It worked. We all are listening to Mp3s on computers..This was a very nice table radio player, for old time radio shows. As it is, OTR has bad audio to begin with. I can't imagine any music head enjoying any rock and roll on it, however, since it does not seem to be designed for loud booming sound. But for low volume stuff it is perfect. How much noise do you need, anyway? I value peace and quiet, and this mp3 player fits MY bill.

I've received this product a couple of days ago, and it seems to work fine enough... The major problem I've noticed is, it skips the end portion of the mp3 songs I have burnt on to my CD. Something like the last 30 seconds of each song is chopped off, which is rather annoying at times.
Good point is, it recognized all of the 183 mp3's burnt on my CD effortlessly. But navigating through it is a real pain-
Also, the FM tuner is a knob controlled one, which makes precise tuning rather tedious. A digital tuner is definitely a must.
Sound quality is "okay", not bad, but some tweeting effect noticed at some higher frequencies.
Overall, I don't think it's worth 80 bucks. I had a 25 buck discount coupon, and so I don't feel so cheated;
Good enough if you aren't too particular about too many things..

Purchased for the sole purpose of playing MP3 CD format Old Time Radio shows. Great looking unit, nice visual display, radio works fine and sounds good, but cut off the ending of ALL shows (5-minute show, cut off 30+ seconds; 30 minute shows, cut off last 5-7 minutes).