Napa DAV-316 Personal CD Player
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Similar in Portable CD Players
- CD-R/CD-RW Playback: CD-R/CD-RW
- Anti Skip Buffer: 45 sec.
- Supported Formats: MP3
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Not a portable player
Pros
Good battery life, 650 megs worth of music
Cons
Non-intuitive interface, skips a lot, bad controls, ugly colors
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
Don't buy if you plan on moving around while using this
I had heard about the new mp3/cd-players and I knew from then that I wanted one. I had looked at a lot of reviews and such and decided I wanted the Diamond Rio, but unfortunately it seems impossible to get hold of in Denmark so I ended up settling on the DAV316 instead. At least it still had a remote control.
The first thing I noticed after opening the box was the horrid colors. I didn't let this trouble me though and went on with burning a cd with a few hundred megs of music and popped it in. The next thing I noticed was that the interface was not very intuitive. There is a 'mode' button which switches between normal, repeat, equalizer, and skip menus. I tried for a long time to switch from the default EQ to Rock but it took me quite a while to figure out that after using the mode button you have to select between the modes with the 'next' button. The 'back' button can't be used for this which is especially impractical with the repeat menu as it has way too many modes in one (repeat off, repeat one, repeat dir, repeat all, scan, random, random dir, and random all). Another thing I quickly noticed was that I had to change the naming of my files to get the player to play them in the correct order. I normally name my files 'Artist - Track# - Song title' but with this thing I had to put Track# first to get it to play the files in a proper order. It's a minor thing but when you have to do it to 650MB of files it's quite annoying.
I started getting used to the controls and little bugs of the thing but several things still annoyed me, especially the fact that the unit's 'hold' function is not seperate from the 'hold' function of the remote. In other words the remote can't be used while the main unit has it's keys locked and that's more than a little annoying.
The thing also comes with a shoulder strap which I used quite a bit, but the controls were obviously not made for this as they're away from you when you're using the strap. Also the display isn't backlit which makes it very annoying to use unless you know the controls by heart.
The thing that made annoyed me most in the end though is that the unit skips WAY too much. Everytime it changes tracks, there's a few seconds' break and quite often it makes short pauses in the middle of the song. I ended up selling it to one of my friends who wouldn't be using it for transport like I mainly do, so it's fine for him, but if you plan on moving around while using this, get something other than an mp3/cd-player as from what I've heard they all skip.
The first thing I noticed after opening the box was the horrid colors. I didn't let this trouble me though and went on with burning a cd with a few hundred megs of music and popped it in. The next thing I noticed was that the interface was not very intuitive. There is a 'mode' button which switches between normal, repeat, equalizer, and skip menus. I tried for a long time to switch from the default EQ to Rock but it took me quite a while to figure out that after using the mode button you have to select between the modes with the 'next' button. The 'back' button can't be used for this which is especially impractical with the repeat menu as it has way too many modes in one (repeat off, repeat one, repeat dir, repeat all, scan, random, random dir, and random all). Another thing I quickly noticed was that I had to change the naming of my files to get the player to play them in the correct order. I normally name my files 'Artist - Track# - Song title' but with this thing I had to put Track# first to get it to play the files in a proper order. It's a minor thing but when you have to do it to 650MB of files it's quite annoying.
I started getting used to the controls and little bugs of the thing but several things still annoyed me, especially the fact that the unit's 'hold' function is not seperate from the 'hold' function of the remote. In other words the remote can't be used while the main unit has it's keys locked and that's more than a little annoying.
The thing also comes with a shoulder strap which I used quite a bit, but the controls were obviously not made for this as they're away from you when you're using the strap. Also the display isn't backlit which makes it very annoying to use unless you know the controls by heart.
The thing that made annoyed me most in the end though is that the unit skips WAY too much. Everytime it changes tracks, there's a few seconds' break and quite often it makes short pauses in the middle of the song. I ended up selling it to one of my friends who wouldn't be using it for transport like I mainly do, so it's fine for him, but if you plan on moving around while using this, get something other than an mp3/cd-player as from what I've heard they all skip.
