Customer Reviews

Classic MP3 Player (CHD1000)

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

The CHD-1000 Player from Classic is a fantastic value for an MP3. Great Sound and small footprint. One thing that is not really advertised about the product is that you do not have to load songs from your PC. All you have to do is connect the CHD-1000 to the back of your current CD player and the unit will encode and store your music in compressed digital format. With 10 Gig's of storage space, I can store up to 200 CDs. The best digital jukebox I have seen for such a low price.

Great sound quality,Huge memory.
One point to note is not advertised is that you can
record directly from a CD without using a computer.
Another important point that it is multicodec which means it will play the new compression formats other than MP-3
The new compression formats create files much smaller than mp3's which means you can store more songs.

I recently bought this mp3 player for a Christmas gift. It seemed like a great product: lots of memory, reasonably priced, compact size and many rave reviews. However, when I tried to set it up, I ran into numerous problems. For starters, while I was uploading music to the device, after 1 GB, it said that it was full. Then the software, Musicmatch, couldn't recognize the device, so I could not reformat its hard drive. The menu system on the mp3 player was confusing and difficult to navigate. Also, I could not find any online support for this virtually unknown company. Although I'm sure I bought a lemon, I didn't care to exchange it for another one, knowing that even if I had gotten it to work, it wouldn't have been worth it anyway.

You can encode music directly from CD with this jukebox, which makes it well worth the money. 10GB of storage and you can use Musicmatch to set up the tunes the way you want them prior to sending them to the harddrive - they play just the way you want them each time without fooling with the buttons. Easily beats the pants off other jukeboxes with less storage which cost more money. Recommend it for kids and adults who want to take all their music with the them!!

I am happy I finally got this to work! A lot of trouble at first setting up. Instruction booklet is very weak in setup and operation! Worst, the company (as the other reviews stated) was extremely hard to track down for Tech Support. Company is not listed clearly in book who makes the machine. On last page of manual, you see an 888 number for a "Combined Luck Industries"!??? You call that number and get one of those computer assisted menus that takes you down many paths! One option stated, "For Support for MP3 player, please call 1-866-333-3384". That number gives you another minor maze of choices, but I finally tracked down their one and only tech support man, Javier. With his help, I was able to work out the glitches! (One of my problems was I already used Music Match Jukebox and had version 7.0. The player shipped with 6.1. Music Match stated they do not support the device) But with Classic tech supports (Javier) help, I uninstalled my newer version of Music Match off my computer, did a disk cleanup, defrag and reinstalled the Music Match version 6.1 off the install CD in the box. (I then went to Music Match website and upgraded back to version 7.0) The Classic CHD1000 Music Machine seamlessly integrated with the Music Match Jukebox software wonderfully.

It now works great! I am very happy with the play back quality. Holds so darn much music, it is incredible. The equalizer is very good. Headphones are also decent quality. Menus took a little getting use to, but once I figured it out it was very easy to use. I have downloaded over a thousand songs and have only filled up almost half the memory in the player!

I would recommend this player but be ready to get someone who knows a little bit about computers should you have the same problems. I only gave this 3 of 5 stars for the 2 weeks worth of pain it took me to get it going. Otherwise the player ranks a solid 4 or 5 stars in playability!

I have purchased many items from Amazon for several years now and this is the first time that I have had to write an unfavorable review. I had purchased the player based on the previous reviews and when I received the player, the software was easy to install and uploading music files to the player was a snap and the quality of audio was very good.

However, after the player went through my playlist once, it got stuck on one song. It would play that one song over and over and over again. At that point, the audio stopped working so I could no longer hear the music. I tried using the "Stop" button to turn the player off but it would not work. None of the buttons would work. I checked to see if the controls were locked but the player wouldn't let me access the menu. I finally had to the let the battery power down. I re-charged the battery and turned the player back on but the same thing happened after the player had played only 2 of my songs.

I called technical support but they never retuned my call. I thought maybe the player was defective so I returned it and got a new one. The same thing happened so I just returned the player.

DO NOT BUY this player. For this amount of money, you are better offer buying an established brand such as Intel or one of the others.

It'll be a long time before I fill up the 10 GB hard disk. I put all my existing MP3's on, and I still have 8.5 GB left. The sound quality is good if you use decent headphones. Files are downloaded via USB and MusicMatch, which works well. There is no way to upload via USB, but you can play through the headphone jack to another device. The music is organized on two levels: genre and album. On three levels (all, genre, album) you can play sequentially, randomly, or repeat. I like to play my selections randomly over the entire disk, and I found that certain files played much more frequently than they should have. Then I guessed that random selection first randomly selects an album, then randomly selects within the album. If an album contains only one file, for example, that file will be hammered over and over. So that I can get a more random selection, I plan on wiping out my files and reloading them, having only one album per genre. However, I haven't encountered this problem when playing randomly within a genre.

The player is nice and small, and doesn't take up much space on my desk while I work.

The rechargeable battery lasts all day, so I don't have to bring the transformer to work.

The XP3 is a great player, but I recommend lumping all tunes of the same genre into the same album.

I'm pretty new to the HDD-Mp3 player game, but I must say the
chd-1000 is a good place to start. It's got great storage space, the sound is great with my Grado-60 headphones, and downloading my wma files with music-match is fast and efficient.
If you've got the 1.c version, it's advisable to go and get the
new firmware 1.0. from the Classic website. The random function
was not working well on my player until getting the upgrade. The
player is bulkier than I would normally like, the small push buttons are awkward, and there's no good navigational system to
find files. With 10 gigs it would also be nice to have programming options. However, the CHD1000 is a better alternative to me than getting another CD-mp3 player. SO here I
am.

This is my first experience with a HD mp3 player so I don't have a lot to compare it with. I also have a Rio Volt 250 CD mp3 player and I can say that the sound from the CHD1000 is just as good. The Music Match software that comes with the player is faster than the one you can download for free and then pay for as a plus version. I bought the plus version before I got the CHD1000. The 6.0plus that comes with the CHD1000 will rip about 2 times faster than the 7.0 plus version now offered for download. I had to install the driver into Windows XP. The installation went smooth although the driver isn't signed and XP protested in its normal way. The driver hasn't caused any problems so far. The software lets you connect to the player via mini USB cable. You can send mp3 WMA files to the player and you can set up folders to send the music too. You cannot however upload anything from the player to your computer. This might be a feature that further models might have. Once you get your music downloaded from the computer into the player, it works beautifully. You can navigate through the folders finding the album you want and then select the song you want to hear. I wish you could do this while playing. Once you start navigating the music stops until you settle on a selection. A big plus is its ability to record from analog source. This means it has a built in AD converter. I know you can record from stereo etc. It should work using a small mixer and microphones to record live as well. All in all though I think it is well worth the money.

It says in the instructions that Windows 98 may not recognize this device. Oh, is that all? To remedy this small problem it goes on to suggest unplugging the USB, reinstalling the software, and then "finding" the drivers yourself. I assume that had I been one of the people for whom the installation went smoothly I might have a more favorable review, but I wasn't so lucky.

After wasting a night getting it to work, I discovered that the software is garbage. It takes over as your primary MP3 player, not to mention every other music related program you may have. All I want is a way to transfer music between the device and my computer. This software tries to connect with the company server to gather info on you every chance it gets. Then it will give you music recommendations and offer to sell you CDs.

Everything about this smells of "cheapness," except the price tag. After a few days I decided it just wasn't worth it. I would avoid this at all costs.