DURABRAND CMV-102A Car CD / MP3 Player

This thing is a piece of junk! Don't even bother wasting your time with it. I bought one after falling for the trick of it being half the price of other MP3/CD car stereos. It turns out this should have been the very reason to avoid it all together.

Durabrand seems to have some serious skipping problems. One of the primary reasons I wanted an MP3/CD player was to listen to audio books on MP3 files. Much to my dismay, this thing can't even play through a 10 minute chapter in an audiobook without skipping. When it skips, it doesn't just miss a sentence or two. It skips all the way to the beginning of the next track. It would be like trying to read a book with a fan flipping 5 or 10 pages at a time and you not having any ability to hold the pages still.

The user interface also stinks. It has simple buttons for volume, but all simplicity ends there. To select a track, rather than simply having track up/down buttons, it has a skip knob of all things. The knob only twists a quarter turn either way. You have to twist it back and forth, because each twist is the same as hitting the track select buttons on a normal CD player. If you hold the knob twisted it cues through the currently playing track instead, and that itself is a big pain while you're driving.

When I was listening to 10 minute tracks, usually it would skip to the next track somewhere in the middle, between 3 and 7 minutes into the track. It won't let you cue in reverse beyond the beginning of the current track, so you have to skip back to the beginning of the previous track and then cue back forward through several minutes of what you have already heard. Then when you finally manage to find the spot you left off on, within another minute or two it skips to the next track and you have to repeat the search all over again. During the week or so that I had this before returning it to the store, I think I spent more time cueing to search for where it left off than I even spent listening to it play!

I think Durabrand is an exclusive brand of Wal-Mart (or at least I haven't seen it anywhere else.) When I finally had a chance to return it to Wal-Mart to exchange for a Pioneer brand instead, the customer service people at the store gave me a big hassle about the stupid wiring harness that it came from. Rather than carrying a simple adapter to go from the plug on the back of the stereo to fit my GM vehicle, they only had a wiring harness by itself with just wires sticking out. So, I had to splice them all together myself. That wasn't so bad, but when I went to return the stereo they would not let me cut the wires off from where the splice connectors were crimped onto the GM wiring harness I bought seperately. They said that if I cut the wires so that they were 1/4" shorter than they were originally, they couldn't accept a return. After complaining to a manager, they agreed to give me a refund on the stereo, the splice connector, and the GM wiring harness under the condition that they remain all in one piece to be returned to Durabrand as being defective. I tried to explain to them several times that they were three seperate products from three seperate manufactures, but they were just clueless. The customer service people even started trying to take the crimped connectors off, despite me telling them that they are a one-time-use part designed in such a way that you must cut the wires and use a new one to recrimp them. Idiots!

Anyway, I strongly recommend that everyone avoid Durabrand like the plague.