Bargain value for good CD player

I was looking for a cheaper alternative to an mp3 player with superior sound quality, this seemed to fit the bill so I bought it on impulse. It is even better than I expected due to its sleek style and excelent sound quality. Definatley recommended.

'Touchy feely'

A solid piece of Sony annalogue kit. Bought to replace a very old Walkman and as a back up to another new Walkman cassette player. The set up is a little fiddly but once mastered the sound quality of both FM/AM radio is good and cassette replay is excellent. 'Luddite' wife found mastering the touch sensitive controls relatively easy after a short while and a little practice. Good annalogue kit stills sounds better than over-compressed digital stuff.

Fab DAB radio for bedroom or kitchen

For the price I believe this is a great piece of kit for your kitchen or bedroom. OK, you can't turn it off on the remote and the scolling text is a little difficult to read but other than that it is full of features and sounds great. It is amazing how much better football commentary sounds on Five Live on DAB than it does on MW! With an RDS FM tuner, CD player, battery or mains operation, headhone socket and cool looks, I recommend it!

Not so bad...

Hello,

I got one of these last week and I was getting almost no sound out of one speaker. I asked amazon for another one and this time I noticed there was a clear plastic tape over the casssette head on the adaptor. I picked this off and cleaned the head with some lighter fluid and the new one worked fine. I then checked my old one before I returned it and it also had this plastic tab over the head. So I'd say if you get one of these make sure you peel this off else it wont work properly. There are no instructions to tell you to do this so its a bit poor really.

Didn’t work for me. Would not recommend

The sales blurb for this item says that it allows an Ipod to be controlled directly from car stereo controls.

It didn’t work for me. Just made really unhealthy sounding noises in the tape deck.

In addition to this, the sound output was ridiculously low (even with volume turned up full).

Would definatley not recommend.

Back to the itrip.....

Poor design but might be value for money...

I have had problems with LG VCRs in the past and gave them another chance with this.

Features on paper it looks good and it does indeed have DAB and play MP3 cds (one of the few around that does both these things). My issue is not with the technical specs but rather with design. For something supposedly portable (it has a carrying handle it must be intended to be portable) it has a number of flaws..

Batteries: it takes 8 C sized batteries, fair enough its a lot but I guess it needs them... BUT it also takes 4 AA batteries just to preserve the DAB memory and power its feeble clock.

Power lead: move the unit around much and the lead falls straight out the back at any provocation. Then when you grapple the unit to put it back in the cassette drawer and CD hatch both open at the slightest touch leaving you with your CD on the floor and your hands full. The same applies to putting batteries in, you have to turn the unit totally over and can guarantee the same thing will happen. Now I know why it shipped with tape keeping the CD and tape drawer closed!!

DAB: Quality can be poor but this depends on reception and bitrate so I wont blame LG."No signal" is a frequent sight.

CD: It takes a while to count how many MP3s are on a disc and if you switch to e.g radio and back again it will count them all over again AND forgets where you were up to, so you have to repeatedly press next track to get back there (50 times.... what fun). In a bizarre twist of user interface design if you hold down the next track button it counts up MORE SLOWLY than manually hammering the button! There doesnt seem to be any shuffle mode either.

Tape: Yes I found some old tapes and used them. They played but this deck doesnt have auto reverse.

Sound Quality: poor - the speakers are no more than 3 inches despite LGs liberal use of plastic to pretend otherwise. The sound has almost no bass. Perhaps this is the norm for such units but I find it hard to believe.

Technically its good but I think LG has a real problem with poor design.

Construction: This is a unit that has been made artificially large to try and impress, most of it is empty space. This makes the unit bulky for no added benefit to the consumer. There is an amusing bit of"Engrish" on the front where it talks about"Decording" DAB signals. The headphone socket is tucked away at the back to ensure you have fun accidentally disconnecting the mains lead and ejecting your tape and CD while trying to plug your headphones in.

Display: its blue its not bad but they made the DAB stations scroll so you have to wait a few second for each stations name to scroll into view which makes looking for a particular station painful and annoying. Buttons arent arranged in a particularly good layout.

Kills the small.

One of the selling features of the Archos Gmini 202, one of the very things that makes it attractive to people who don’t want to feel like they’re carrying an original gameboy in their pocket when they want a 20 gig player, is its TINY size...

...if you want to preserve that tiny size when you protect the player, I wouldn’t recommend this case. That is, of course, if you don’t mind people staring at the giant protrusion from your beltline.