Home > Consumer Reviews > iriver iMP50 MP3 / CD Player with Car Adapter

I bought this thru Amazon & with rebate, it only came out to around $30. The main useage for this unit is at work , hooked to an ac adapter & a set of Monsoon speakers. It seemed to have a lot of options as far as the display & flexibility to handle both mp3 & wma format (although I never use/have any wma)
Build wise, it feels cheap. The door (which is on the bottom, and ends up being much more of a nuisance that I originally thought it would be)moves around on it's hinges. Major hassle to reload discs. Sound quality is fine, but it seems to have major trouble reading discs that play flawlessly in my other players. You can hear that skriiitching noise is it tries to find it's way.
I only used it a few times on batteries, and as reported by many others, 16 hours per set playing mp3 is a dream (or better yet, a myth) I had updated the firmware from the iRiver website, but did not notice any improvements. So in summing up this player...I guess I got what I paid for. A cheap player.

Battery life is terrible! I've never had a another mp3 player before, so maybe others are worse, but I use this for gym workouts of maybe an hour or so, and the batts (good Powerex rechargeables) are OK for maybe two sessions, and after that you takes your chances! One of the reviews here mentioned that mp3 content has something to do with batt life. I archive my collection with 192kbps (anything really irreplaceable is kept as a .wav, but I've only been using mp3's with this player); I'm not a fussy audiophile, but anything below 192 is definitely noticeable, so why bother? Even worse, since you have to keep removing & recharging batts, is their location: you have to open up where the cd is (not all that ergonomically easy, either), pull the cd off its spindle, lay it down somewhere, then open the little batt door and pull 'em out. Hope the cd doesn't get scratched when I lay it down somewhere without having to go find a jewel case for it! Speaking of ergonomics, the control buttons are goofily laid out in semi-circular fashion, not intuitive to me at all. Guess some of you really buy stuff 'cause it looks nice or cute or whatever, so maybe you'll like this arrangement, but I didn't buy the unit to -duh- look at it. Another problem I have with this unit is lack of sound volume. Again, this is my first mp3 player, so I can't compare it with others, but I use Plane Quiet noise-cancelling headphones (I love them!), and sometimes I'll have to rerecord things with additional volume just so I can hear them easily. I think they could have provided more volume power. Oh, and one more thing--it skips sometimes, too.

The quality of the sound of this CD player is acceptable - The player is advertised as having a sixteen hour battery life, however I have never gotten more than six hours from the best AA batteries I could purchase and I am very disappointed with that. It significantly increases the price of owning and using this player. Also - the slightest shock makes the battery compartment pop open and the music stops.

Pros:
Excellent user menu. Nice customizations. Upgradable.
Excellent battery life.
Nifty features. Check product description for features. Stands up to description.

Cons:
No backlit LCD. Blind at night.
CD loads on reverse side. Can get pretty clumsy to change CDs.
Some MP3 CDs take a long time to load.

This player is the greatest player at the best price for audiobooks. It remembers exacly where you turned it off for the last 10 disks left in the player. Plays from 8Kbit to 196 Kbit MP3s.

Love this player, would have payed a lot more for it.