Customer Reviews

Classic Portable MP3 Jukebox with 10GB Memory (CHD500)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

A friend had the misfortune of buying this hunk of junk. She bragged to me about how much money she saved over buying an iPod. She finally gave it to Goodwill and spent the money for an iPod. She wasted 100 bucks.

So what was wrong?

First, she never could understand the cryptic menu system. Second the case was horribly made, it cracked in 3 places with fairly delicate handling.

Battery problems and other random button problems did not help.

If you are reading this review obviously you want advice, so here is mine....

Consider this review a coupon for 100 bucks off an iPod. You will just throw this thing away and buy a real product later so save the 100 bucks to begin with.

-Wow 10GB for around $100

$100 well wasted.

-9hrs battery life

Goodluck with getting 45-60mins of playing time,

not including the mysterious shutdowns during play.

-Uploading new musics

While transfer is rated @ 1.1 Usb. Be ready with a new batch of coffee, for the complete index has to be updated on the player itself with every new file input.

-Quality of craftsmanship

Let just say things start to fall apart in less than a week. Exterior fixtures start to come apart. Interior sounded to have loose parts.

***NOT WORTH THE MONEY/TIME.

***NOT WORTH THE MONEY/TIME.

***NOT WORTH THE MONEY/TIME.

***NOT WORTH THE MONEY/TIME.

***NOT WORTH THE MONEY/TIME.

Let me start with the good things about the CHD500:

1) Price!! (beats the crap out of other HD drive based products)
2) Great for backing up stuff from u'r stuff and laptop with its large memory
3) Sound is good (when it does play) and the line out feature is cool

Now the bad things:

1) It freezes often
2) Baterry life sucks. I can barely get 1 hour after charging for 10 hours. (This might be a problem with just my player because I have read some good comments about the battery)
3) Navigation is way too complicated. Cannot create playlists on the go, cannot play songs at random, cannot browse for other songs when a song is playing
4) Takes a long time to load a new song

Bottom line: If I could turn back time, I will pay the extra $100 and go for an Ipod.

Also I've heard good things about the CHD1000.

This product is total crap.. It messed up almost immediatly after I got it the buttons fell in and the screen blurred.. Don't buy it!

I received the Classic CHD500 as a Christmas gift. I was skeptical about using this or any MP3 player because of lack of experience with any unit. However, I finally broke the seal and started to work. I found that my major problem was learning to use the Musicmatch player/recorder software that comes with the unit. There is a tutorial on their website that helps. Once past the learning stage, I found that transfer to the player was fast, easy and reliable. The CHD500 automatically indexes your downloads and makes retrieval and playing easy. AND...with the built in equalizer, you can taylor the sound to your preference. The sound quality is really good.

I did make a change that helped the sound quality. That was to substitute the earphones from my old Sony Walkman. These are the type that fit into your ears - Model MDR W10.

The price was $ from Circuit City and comes with a $ rebate.
I have loaded several albums so far. The unit will accept 250 hrs of mp3 music (15 GB hard drive), which will handle my needs for a long time. The major question to be answered is long term reliablity.

So far, so good.

My friend actually recieved this product as a gift. After only a few weeks, the audio jack had already broken. She gave it to me to repair. I noticed how cheaply the whole thing was put together. The connector was cheap and chinsey and it was only held on with 3 tiny surface mount solders. (No wonder it fell off.) Fourtuanately, I was able to fix it, and it worked fine. A few days later, the battery had come loose, and I again fixed it by opening it up and bending the battery contacts to hit the motherboard. A while longer, and the jack broke off again. This time, it is much worse, and it is impossible to just solder it back on. After much time searching the internet, I found the number and called Classic only to reach a messaging system. They called me back 2 weeks later and told me that they could not send me parts, and that I would have to send it to them. So now I am stuck, without being able to fix it. I will probably buy a broken one on ebay to fix it. Anyway, you could just buy this for the IBM travelstar HDD inside it, since it is probably worth more than the MP3 player.

I wanted to like this product, I really did. It had decent storage for a cheap price. But, I guess the old addage is true, you get what you pay for. Especially with electronics. Mostly, I think the combination of it being a first generation product and the complete and utter lack of technical support on Classic's part make's it a piece of crap. For now. If they can get their act together I think it'll be a decent player. But for now stick with Archos.

Ok, so maybe this thing sucks now but I bought it in 2002 and when my shiny, new name-brand MP3 player died on me recently, I pulled this out of cold storage and it still works just as good as ever! (that is to say, not very well, but it's the best-functioning mp3 player I own right now)

Sure it's about as big an actual brick.

Sure the battery life isn't that great. (see how long you can hold a charge while maintaining adequate RPM's on a tiny disk drive... and honestly, it really isn't that bad, it will last me almost a full day at work on a charge; how long do you really need to listen to music uninterrupted without being able to plug it in? pro tip: turn off the backlight if the answer to that is more than about 10 minutes)

Sure it has no capability for creating playlists, controlling the order it plays music from either inside or outside the device, or even looking at your tracklist while playing a song.

Sure all those things, but it was pretty awesome in 2002, and it still works today. Despite hundreds of hours of use (and about 4 years thrown haphazzardly in a box, unpadded, surviving about 6 or so moves), I have no problems with the device at all. The hardware is still in tact, the display still works perfectly fine, the backlight still turns on, it still communicates (slowly) with my computer, the sound quality is good, it just works. The battery even still had a charge when I pulled it out of my closet after close to 4 years of unuse and all the data was in tact as well.

As far as actually positive qualities are concerned, it connects to your computer via one of those small USB's that anyone with a few electronic devices probably has a few dozen of, and it doesn't have any goofy proprietary software to get stuff onto it. You can use Windows Media Player if you want, but one of its real strengths is being able to put whatever you want on it. I've used this thing for it's 10gb storage capacity nearly as much as I've used it for music. Drag and drop is the name of the game baby.

It's got a lot of problems, perhaps too many for me to recommend buying one now, but if you've got one stashed in your closet somewhere that you bought before iPods were the standard of the industry, and you've got no other options for portable music, then you can't go wrong with digging out the old CHD500. The parts that work well still work well, and the parts that don't work well are so hilariously bad that it almost makes it ok. (if anyone ever manages to figure out the dark algorithms this thing uses to sort the music you put on it, drop me a line and I'll go halfsies with you on the travel fees when we win the Nobel prize for advancing the field of Mathematics)

But as everyone else has stated...you get what you pay for. When it is working it is a wonderful player for the price. But it rarely works right. I haven't had the same problems as everybody else stated (battery life, long indexing time, cutting off for no reason), mine will be playing a song and in the middle of it start up from the middle of another song. The title won't change on the display, just the song being played. It will do it a few times and turn the song into a 15 minute remix of all the songs I have on the player. I like remixes, but this is out of control!! I have tried downloading the firmware to see if that fixes it...but no luck. I reccommend forking out a little extra cash and getting a better player. Too much hassle with this one.

-great sound(with the right head phones)THE ONES IT COMES WITH ARE JUNK.
-NOT AS SMALL AS SOME WOULD LIKE.
-IF YOU WANT A CLEAN CONTROL INTERFACE GET AN IPOD.
-SOFTWARE IT COMES WITH IS HARD TO LEARN AND COMPLEX TO USE AT THE BEST OF TIMES
-THE NUMBER ONE THING IT HAS GOING FOR IT IS THAT IT IS CHEAP.
-IF YOU HAVE THE EXTRA MONEY GET A ZEN OR AN IPOD.
-WARNING! IF YOU CHAGE THE SOUND SETTINGS TO FAST AND TO MANY TIME THE MP3 WILL SKIP FOR SOME TIME.
OVER ALL IT IS CHEAP AND IT WORKS