5 out of 5 people found this review helpful.
Wish I bought it 5 years ago
Date of Review: Jan 25, 2004
The Bottom Line: Buy it. Cheap, easy-to-use, holds 300 CDs
Probably the best $200 we have spent - it holds 300 CDs and lets you enter the titles with a PC keyboard. Getting all 250 of our CDs out of storage boxes and loaded has let us really enjoy our music collection. If we get more CDs we have the option of daisy chaining the units together. This unit only plays CDs - no DVDs or MPs.
The user interface is pretty intuitive - DIAL ONE lets you select the CD (the title or disk number is displayed). DIAL TWO lets you select tracks within a CD (or if you are in multi-disk shuffle play, turning the second dial randomly selects the next track). Turning DIAL TWO does not show the track # or title, which would be nice to see.
There are 8 different play groups and you can assign each CD to one play group (only one). You can then select a play group and have the CDs play in their 'natural' order, shuffle play across the playgroup, or use DIAL ONE to get to the CDs in that play group (and skip CDs in other play groups). It would be nice if you could assign a CD to multiple play groups.
It took my wife about 6 hours to load and 'label' the CDs in the unit and then assign them to categories. Definitely attach a keyboard to the player to type in the titles.
One watchout is that the unit is pretty deep - I found myself cutting out the back with a circular saw at 11pm as I was installing it over the holidays - luckily no one woke up!
After 1 month we have had no issues with skipping or anything - some our CDs are 15 years old (from other reviews I was worried about this. Crutchfield told me that they were not aware of this issue and that I could return it if that was an issue).
