DURABRAND CD-96 Personal CD Player

The first thing I noticed out of the box is that the DC-power in jack is not the standard size used by at least three other portable CD players that I have owned. As such it did not work with my existing 12VDC car power adaptor. So I had to use batteries.

I liked the fact that this player can read mp3 CDs with normal directory names and files. Some others require special names or read only from the root directory.

I did not enjoy the excruciatingly slow fast-forward. To return to where I left-off within a 10 minute audiobook track, it seriously took about 1 minute of fast-forwarding time to advance about 3 or 4 minutes of playback.

The other negative was the excessive number of skips and pops. Some of my MP3/CDs that played fine in other players had far more skips and pops when played in this Durabrand player.

Finally, there is no memory of where you last stopped playback. This feature is more common in dashboard mp3/CD players, but was a feature of my previous mp3/CD player from a bigger name brand. With at least 12 hours, and hundreds of tracks of audio on an mp3 CD it is very useful to have the player remember at least the track if not the exact position you were on when you last stopped the player. This is not a feature of this player. Hit stop, and you will have to find your own way back to the last track played.

While resuming play at the last track played is not a crucial feature of a portable mp3/CD player, for me it was the dealbreaker. If it had this feature but kept the other annoyances, I probably would have kept it since I didn't want to pay too much.

All together, this player just didn't cut it for me.