Price Paid:  $350.00 from Crutchfields

Summary:
I was initially very pleased with this unit since it had good clean sound and allowed me to consolodate several shelves of cd jewel cases down to one neat box. I'm still pleased about these qualities a year later.

As for usability, I find the front panel buttons to be a little confusing. The remote is much simpler to use.

A tip for anyone new to big 200+ cd juke boxes: If buy a new CD and come running home and pop it in the first empty slot that spins by, jot down the slot number or stop and enter the title for that slot. Neglect this step and you'll spend 15 minutes searching for that disk several days later, when you've forgetten which slot you put it in. (And if your brain is like mine, and you refuse to learn from your 1st mistake, you'll spend another 15 minute looking for the same disk a week later. eeef.)


The unit has been very reliable and has had no failures to speak of...EXECEPT ONE: Now this may be just me, but from day one, I have not been able to sweet talk this unit into sampling form more that 10 CDs during random play. The guy at Crutchfield told me that this was a bug (feature?) in the unit's logic and that I would need to contact JVC. So I did. I went out to JVCs website, which is extremely well designed not to accidentally provide customers with any form of contact information for JVC support, where I did eventually find an e-mail address for support. I wrote, and I wrote again, and again. No answer. Bad address on their web site? perhaps. So I called. I was asked to leave a message with my name and phone number because all their agents were busy. I did. Did I get a call back? You guessed it: no.

So, that's my only big complaint: stupid random play mode, and stupider customer service. The latter bad experience has turned me off from seriously considering JVC stuff in the future. I can understand a flaw in the product, but there's no excuse for ignoring customers. Scortched earth customer policy.
Otherwise, this is a descent unit which I would recommend if you get a good price. Final rating then, 3-3.

Strengths:
Digital + Analog outs; Plays my CD/Rs; reliable. Automatically reads titles/text from newer CDs.

Weaknesses:
Random play picks same 10 disks every time. JVC customer service was lame. Title entry causes brain damage. Hard to find misplaced CD (my bad?)

Similar Products Used:
None.

Price Paid:  $180.00 from egghead

Summary:
I either get the equipment that never breaks, and lasts forever (1%), or I get the stuff that works for 1 - one day before exploding in a puff of smoke (99%). If you have 200 cd's and are never going to buy any more, and have good mojo, then I would say keep looking, and if you must buy it, I wish you luck.

Strengths:
'Sounded' better than what I had before.

Weaknesses:
Stoped working. Noise. I really don't like red lights on electronic equpment (can't sleep, scary robots will eat me). JVC service runaround.

Similar Products Used:
sony top load cd player i got like 10 years ago

Price Paid:  $250.00 from HIFI 2000

Summary:
IT'S SOUND BAD,IT'S GOT A REVERB LIKE EFFECT,DON'T BUY THI ONE,I RETURNED MINE AFTER TRYING IT OUT FOR 2 DAYS.

Strengths:
I ONLY HAVE THIS FOR 2 DAYS,SO I CAN'T COMMENT ON THIS

Weaknesses:
THE MUSIC DOESN'T SOUND NATURAL

Similar Products Used:
KENWOOD 200 DISC THIS ONE IS WAY BETTER

Price Paid:  $189.00 from Circuit City

Summary:
Not a bad unit, chose it over the equivalent Sony (same price) because it offered more display area for the text entry and also lets you make separate entries for artist, title and genre (the Sony only gives you 13 characters total, that's it).

It turned out that the carousel is a HUGE pain. You can't easily tell what's in the player, and what's worse you can't change the next CD you want to play while a CD isalready playing (because there's no way to get at the CD slot that will play next, since it's rotated inside the machine). You can only change the 25 discs that are visible on the opposite end of the carousel from the disc that is in play. So if you want to change the next CD that will play, you need to manually program the unit to play that slot next--very annoying.

Also annoying is that if you want to do a shuffle and only have 50 or so CDs in the player, it will stop at every empty slot it hits and try to read a CD there before it removes that slot from it's memory. So at first you end up waiting a long time between track changes until it figures out which slots in the carousel are empty and can be skipped.

The dumbest thing though is that when you enter CD text (or the unit reads info off a prewritten CD-Text CD), it assigns the text not to memory, but to that SLOT in the player. That means if you change that CD to another, it continues to display the information from the old CD until you manually change or delete the text (or put in a CD-Text CD that it can read). So you end up with tons of slots that display the wrong CD information.

Why they do this, when for over 10 years there have existed CD players that can recognize a CD and recall text from memory that you've entered previously for it, is beyond me. I guess they figure people will dump all their CDs in the unit and never change them, but since I have over 700 CDs this doesn't work for me.

Without a useful text feature it's unbelievably difficult to tell what is in the machine, or to select a particular cd you want to hear, so I retuned the unit and bought a Technics SL-MC7. It does the dumb text thing too, but since it uses a much more elegant linear storage system instead of a carousel, you can easily get at and see ALL the CDs in the unit at once, so it is better for me (plus it was $30 cheaper). I'd recommend checking out the SL-MC7 before buying ANY mega changer carousel unit.

Strengths:
Price, Features

Weaknesses:
Carousel makes disc swapping a chore, dumb text entry system assigns text to the slot, not the CD

Similar Products Used:
Technics SL-MC7

Summary:
The only draw back on this system is the noise the changer makes when switching cds. but at a dollar a cd good value.

Strengths:
Holds 200 CDS, good programing capability up to 32 songs or disks your choice, random play full 200 disks,

Weaknesses:
Noiseier than the Sony, or Kenwood when changing cds but the rest of the system is JVC so I was stuck I have to many remotes as it is

Similar Products Used:
None