Home > Consumer Reviews > Siren SIR103 IV 4 GB MP3 Player

I have owned three of these mp3 players. The first one was indestructible, but I was finally forced to get a new one. The 2nd one (bought here at Amazon, through J&R) didn't work, so I returned it and got it replaced. The third one had even more problems than any of the others, so I'm now in the process of finding something else.

The positives? Great price, replaceable AAA battery, good sound.

The negatives? Quite a few, unfortunately. The player will shut off all the time, for no obvious reason. Then you have to power it back on, which sometimes takes several minutes. The "shuffle" feature works oddly: sometimes after powering off, if you had it on "shuffle", it will take you right back to the beginning of the shuffle sequence. In other words, the shuffle follows the exact same pattern all the time, unless you manually reconfigure it. And even then, if you've done that, and it turns off on its own, it will start again at its ORIGINAL shuffle sequence beginning. VERY annoying.

The buttons work.....sometimes. Other times, they just don't. The display is fine as long as you're not in any kind of light; then it's impossible to read.

This could have been a great deal, but with all the little quirks and malfunctions and other problems, it's just not reliable enough to keep around. I wish I had saved the receipt from this latest one: I would've returned it and asked for my money back.

In short, don't buy this unless you're into irritation.

I have purchased Siren SIR103 IV 4 GB MP3 Player, as a former owner of Rio products I'm happy with Siren overall. I have one question about a feature that is very important for me as an audio book listener. It seems that I cannot make my Siren to remember the last position of the track after a powerdown - it does remember the album and the last song but not the current position. For a long abook track (20+ minutes) it is imposable to navigate to exact point of a track where you had to shutdown the device. I called the customer's support - they confirmed that the feature was dropped!. Why?! A such small feature will cost them to lose 10% to 30% of the MP3 market!. Oh well, I'm returning the unit back to store.

Very appropriate that "Take Me Back" is the track title that is displayed on the pic here and on the instruction manual. It's good advice!

The play/pause and track navigation control is stiff, frustrating, and unreliable. I have a paid subscription to a site that allows me to download their programming that is close to 2 hours in length. So the ability to forward and reverse scan *within* a track is a must for me. Although this player certainly has this ability, the controls are so stiff that often it either doesn't respond at all when I hold down the reverse, or it jumps to a previous track instead of reverse scanning. Sometimes it will jump forward or backward a track when I've clearly pushed the pause button. Very irritating.

The sound quality is also not great. My ancient Rio player sounded awesome. This Siren player just sounds so-so.

It also has a known glitch acknowledged by Siren's tech support. Tracks can become literally invisible to your computer (although this happened to me only once.) They are still on the player using memory and can still be played by the player, but cannot be deleted or accessed at all by your computer. The solution from Siren tech support? Reformat the player and wipe out all tracks/files. So I wouldn't trust this for storing data, even though I believe it does have this ability.

cheap but woks for less than 1 year, then you are pretty much forced to get a new one