RCA RP2458 Portable CD/MP3 Player
See it at Amazon.com for $109.99Average Customer Rating
(4.0 out of 5)
Amazon Customer Reviews
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(5 out of 5)Best CD/MP3/WMA Player!!
I finally got it, and when I got it out of the box I knew it was a winner. Sound quality with audio cd's and mp3 cd's is superb. The interface is easy to use, even without reading the manual I figured it out. The screen is well lited and shows everything you need, it even has animations! The player has a sturdy feel and it weights very little. The headphones sound good too, but I replaced them for the Sony MDR - G51 streetstyle over-the-neck headphones because I feel thay are a bit superior from the ones you get. An outstanding product over-all, I highly recommend it.
Buy it!
(5 out of 5)Damn good machine
Construction: Once you hold it in your hand you'll be amazed at both how light and well constructed this player is. The top half of the player is a beatiful brushed aluminum and when it closes you can barely see a seam. If you've ever owned a CD player that has had the top part break off get loose or the plastic securing clasps snap, you'll appreciate how the unit is made. The door is connected to the top part of the unit by a thick bar and metal hinges that are part of the unit's top. The unit has two clasps that are also made out of metal and are part of the top. In other words there are no plastic parts on the door part of the unit that can break. This unit is made to last a good long time.
Sound Quality: Excellent. Nuff said.
Cool Feature #1: Built in battery recharger. Go to Radio Shack, get 3 AAA rechargeable batteries and stick them in the unit. Hit the charge button and in a few hours you're ready to go. No more batteries to buy. Plus the thing holds a charge for a good long time. The unit comes with its own AC charger, which isn't always the case for players in this price range.
Cool Feature #2: Built in DSP effect button for MP3's. Sound too high? Hit the bass effect. Too bassy? Hit the Surround effect. Sound ok? Leave it on normal.
Cool Feature #3: Push button volume (no silly wheels). It also has a secondary Line Out jack that pushes out the sound at a low but steady volume in case you want to plug the unit to a tape adapter in your car. The reason this is cool is since the volume is controlled and low, you actually conserve battery life. The unit should play alot longer hooked up to your car than with headphones.
Cool Feature #4: Adjustable backlit display. Adjustable in that you can set contrast as well as the time (from 3-10 seconds) it takes to shut itself off. The 'Enter' button triggers the backlit display when the unit is playing. If you've ever tried to find a particular song while driving at night you will appreciate this feature.
Cool Feature #5: Ease of physical navigation. Someone at RCA took an ergonomics class and kept good notes. The unit is designed to be easily operated with one finger. All the buttons are clearly marked and arranged in a small crescent around where you're thumb would be if you were holding the player. No need to hunt around for buttons hidden in strange places on the player.
Cool Feature #6: Ease of file navigation. Whatever way you saved and organized your mp3 files on the disk is how you'll find them on the player. It also uses the SmartTrax system to sort the files by album artist and genre irregardless of how the files were saved on the disk.
Overall, for the price that Amazon is selling it for, this is a steal. The unit is easily worth twice as much just on sound qulaity and construction alone.
Is the player perfect? Close. The minor annoyances I have with the unit are:
* The Headphones suck. Toss'em. They're that bad. Hey RCA had to hold costs somewhere. I'm glad they skimped on the headphones rather than the unit.
* Screen scrolls up and down, but not left to right. If you are not going to use the SmarTrax system and just plan to drop mp3 files onto a disk, When you make your CD's, make sure that you name the file with the name of the song first and create folders to organize your songs.
* At first I thought it would be great if it had a remote, but after playing with it I stopped wishing it had one. Since the thing is so light and can be operated by my thumb it doesn't really need one.
Basically RCA sacrificed the remote and the headphones to give you a superior player with an AC adapter and built in battery charger. Smart move on their part.
PS - I've already purchased three of these. One for myself and the other two for jealous family members. Yes, its that good.
(5 out of 5)Phoenix Electronics Fan Retraction
It would seem my prior review was in haste. The player I received was defective, an unusual anomaly coming from RCA. The mechanism for the laser reader was not moving properly. Amazon.com was extremely helpful and quick to process an exchange for a working model. Having a fully working model, I highly recommend this item, does everything it says, and at this price and set of features it is the best buy for your money, nothing else can beat it. It has more features than models twice the price and really does have excellent sound with the DBBS. I highly recommend it!
(5 out of 5)Excellent product
I was looking for a replacement MP3 CD player for my old one which simply stopped running on batteries. So battery life is my first priority when purchasing. I also wanted a better product since my old one does not display ID3 tags which makes finding a particular song really hard. Then one day I saw this. Wow, it is 50% off. After reading all the excellent feature, I knew this will be my choice. Upon getting the unit, I have done quite a bit of testing with all kinds of different CDs. Commercial CDs, Single and multi-sessioned MP3 and WMA CDs. This player could read them all, although it occasionally had some trouble reading multisession. Give it a couple of more tries and they will work. Battery life is long, approximately 20 hours using 3 AAA Energier 750mAh rechargeable. It even has a backlit LCD, which is really nice. ESP extreme works well overall but there can be skips at the beginning of a song. Sound quality is awesome with DBBS turned on. But, by far the best feature is SmartTrax, the best MP3/WMA CD navigation system ever. To use it, you need to use Musicmatch Jukebox's MP3 burning feature and turn on .MAU list support. Once you have done so, put the disc into the player. And it automatically sorts all the songs into categories like artist, genre, year, title and playlist. It is even better than the NaviTrack those TDK players have. Definitely a great buy.
(5 out of 5)Great value - hope it lasts.
Was all ready to purchase a Panasonic model (SL-MP70) having had better luck with their portable CD players in the past than anyone else's, when I came across this RCA. I've honestly never purchased an RCA product before and was unsure of their reputation these days. But what sold me was the display - with a lot of MP3's on a disc, ID tags are an absolute must and a 4 line display is certainly helpful. When I read from the comments here that it also had backlighting (the Panasonic doesn't), well, that clinched it.
I have not been disappointed so far and for [the money]I feel this is a great deal. All aspects of this player's performance have been excellent. The display is bright and clear and really does give a lot of info, including scrolling album title, year and genre (provided it's all in the ID tag). The sound quality is great - assuming you use your own headphones, as the ones that come with the player are absolute trash (this shouldn't surprise you at this price point - I have a pair of Koss Portapros that I use for portables). It is loud enough to hear fine in the NYC subway, and this is often a sticking point for me in portable CD players (returned 2 Sony models to the store a couple years ago because of it). The build quality is better than I expected for [the money] and it looks pretty slick too.
I only hope it holds together - it does have a quality feel at first but the more you use it the more you appreciate the engineering that went into making it feel like it's better built than it actually is. The buttons, for example, are nice and stiff - but they occasionally click oddly if you don't press them exactly right (like the equivalent of cracking a knuckle - as if you've clipped a piece of interior plastic a bit). The laser assembly makes a loud cranking noise when it's moving - it's not smooth at all. And on my player, anyway, there is dust and smudging underneath the exterior glass on the display - there's no way to clean this out. Still, except for the dirt under the glass - probably unique to my unit - this player feels like it should cost more than it does.
About the only real performance-related complaint I can make is that the pause between MP3 songs is quite long - about 4-5 seconds or so - making listening to some continous albums a bit different than the way the artist originally intended. All you can really do is rip to one continuous track if you want to get rid of these pauses, as it seems the player seeks to the beginning of each track individually, loads it into memory and then stops spinning the disc. It's the constant spinups/seeks at the track starts that cause the pauses.
Otherwise, though, great player for the price. The functionality of the display is better than anything else at this price point or perhaps any other price point in a CD-based MP3 player, and the music sounds great. It also has handled all sorts of MP3's I've thrown at it so far; CBR, VBR, up to 320k/sec. I haven't tried WMA (nor will I probably ever) and I haven't even tried a regular CD (I bought it mainly for MP3 CD's), but I have no reason to believe it would handle these any differently than it does MP3's. I highly recommend this as a budget player; I just hope mine lasts me a good long time.