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Review 2 of 29
Price Paid:
$200.00
from Crutchfield Summary:
I found this little (little?) gem during a quest for the XL-MC302 (http://www.audioreview.com/CD+Players/JVC+XL-MC302/PRD_123908_1586crx.aspx) which introduced me to the wonderful world of Crutchfield. Since that other unit had apparently been discontinued, I decided to give this one a whirl. Hey, for $200, you can't go too wrong, and this was about 50% less than my first JVC CD player that had in the 80's, so it was a pretty easy decision.
When it arrived, I was slightly shocked by how large the shipping box was. Ok, lots of packing material inside, I figured, and expected a smaller box within. Well, it WAS smaller, but barely. When I got this beast out, well, it's big. Luckily, it's not much bigger than it needs to be though, especially when you consider that about 95% of the unit's volume is dedicated to the CD storage mechanism, unlike the smaller single players which are essentially a small 2"x8"x6" drive assembly, a small PC board & PS, surrounded by lots of empty space (Single CD players could be so much thinner these days).
I have a modest CD collection of approximately 130 discs, so I wasn't hurting for storage with this thing. I was eager to see it in action, so I immediately started adding the discs. This was probably the most tedious setup process I had ever gone through with Hi-Fi equipment, including cabling. If you don't bother with labeling the CDs, then the process will only take a couple minutes, but you'll pay for the haste soon enough when you try to locate a CD later.
A keyboard would make title input much faster, but instead, you're stuck with the front dial on front panel buttons for selecting characters (like entering your name for a high score on a video game), or a few buttons on the remote. If you're near-sighted like me, the front panel is the more convenient of the two since the blue FL display is hard to make out if your vision is a bit weak (I still prefer the look of the old orange backlit LCD displays of the 80's RX7-VBK era). Either way, this process will take you a while to complete if you have a respectable number of discs. I spent the better part of the afternoon feeding it titles.
The player does support CD Text, but that probably wont make people's lives much easier, since to date, I've only found three CDs that incorporate it. If you do have such a disc, then the player will program itself with the title an Strengths:
Disc searching ability (though more option are always welcome).
Convenience
CompuLink compatibility
CD-Text compatibility Weaknesses:
No CD-RW support
No MP3 support
No disc title memory Similar Products Used:
JVC RX-DP10 THX receiver
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