Genica GN803 Tavarua Portable MP3/CD Player

by Genica

Product Details

Product Manual [65kb PDF]

• Product Dimensions: 6 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches ; 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B000053UER
• Item model number: GN803
• Batteries: 2 AA batteries required. (included)
• Average Customer Review: 2.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

Going on a road trip? Tired of changing CDs after a dozen songs or so? Genica's GN803 Tavarua portable MP3-CD player lets you convert your CD audio files to MP3 format and store up to 170 MP3-formatted songs on a single CD.

The Tavarua plays MP3 files and CD audio files from CD and CD-R media. It does not read CD-RW discs, as its design requires sampling at 44.1 KHz, the standard rate for CDs.

The GN803 supports ISO 9660 file formatted directories and also accommodates long file names. Bit rates between 32 and 196 Kbps are also supported, but variable bit rates are not. Be aware that this player lacks a built-in flash memory, meaning you need to transfer your MP3 files to CDs before playing them.

Playback modes are limited. They include random/shuffle and repeat play, while the LCD displays only track number and elapsed time. The 50-second antiskip buffer is great for portable use, virtually eliminating irritating skips.

The GN803's dynamic bass boost pumps up the bass and balances tone, offering a fairly full audio experience. It also comes with a rapid track advance that speeds through the directory to access the track you want.

Headphone, microphone, and AC adapter inputs are included. The GN803 comes with an AC adapter and can run on two AA alkaline or ni-cad batteries (not supplied). A set of earphones is also supplied.

Genica backs the GN803 Tavarua with a one-year parts and labor warranty.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Caveat Emptor, December 14, 2000

By 

M. J. Walters "dargelos" (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Genica GN803 Tavarua Portable MP3/CD Player (Electronics)

Right out of the box, the Genica was something of a disappointment. It did not recognize more than half the mp3s I'd burned to discs, and a quick read-through of the manual explained why.

1) CDRW is not supported. 2) Discs must be recorded using ISO-9660 or Joliet file systems, so if you're using Adaptec, you can't make use of the Direct CD function. This also limits the number of files in any given directory to 256. 3) You can't use larger capacity discs; 650 megs is the limit 4) The bitrates must be between 32 and 192 5) Playlist files are not supported 6) On a disc with mixed data types, only mp3s will be recognized. 7) No mp3 files following a non-mp3 file will be recognized.

It took me 3 tries to burn a disk on which most of the files were finally recognized. Then the beeping started. The disc would play without pause, but the "No disc" warning would show up repeatedly, accompanied by an annoying little beep that drowned out the music. A call to tech support confirmed that yes, it was odd, particularly as the beeping didn't seem to occur when I played regular CDs. However those produced a strange clicking noise at the start of each track.

I returned the unit to the place I originally bought it, (not Amazon.com, which will always be a lesson to me!) and instead of a replacement unit, I got a note from tech support saying that they couldn't find a problem and they were going to ship it back to me. So here's what I discovered when I got it back and ran my own tests:

Run the unit off of the AC adaptor and you'll probably have no trouble. Run it off of batteries and it will eventually start to skip and beep at you even though the disc is playing correctly. You get about half an hour to an hour's decent play out of a pair of double A batteries.

Don't EVEN try to burn discs for this puppy until you're sure you've got all the information down cold. You'll just waste blank discs.

Learn the controls; they are NOT intuitive and in fact can cause a bit of confusion.

Would I buy this unit again? No. Will it fit my needs until I can afford something better? Probably.

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars I always wanted (an expensive) paper weight..., December 10, 2000

By 

Chris Boone (Virginia Beach, Virginia USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Genica GN803 Tavarua Portable MP3/CD Player (Electronics)

I had been looking for a machine like this. It seemed inevitable to me that this technology was right around the corner, but nobody seemed very anxious to get one on the market. I don't know the exact story behind this machine, but there are lots of machines out there that look exactly the same and come with the exact same accessories, but have different names on them. I think perhaps they were bought up from a manufacturer who went bankrupt??? Who knows why this phantom manufacturer disappeared? I do! This machine, called the Tavarua by Genica, is, as they would say in the military, a cluster foxtrot. I got it, put batteries in it and it played an audio cd fine. Great, but I didn't shell out samolians to play audio cd's. So I burned a CDR with mp3's on it. I put the CDR in the machine and pressed play. Now, it was sitting perfectly still on the table but you would have thought that I was using it to play ping pong while jumping up and down on a pogo stick during an earthquake. It wasn't so much the skipping that bothered me, but the annoying bursts of music that came in between the skips... So it skipped too much...the first thing I thought was, 'what am I doing wrong?' I thought perhaps I didn't burn the disc properly. So I read the manual that came with the machine... Calling it a manual is much like calling a fortune cookie a novel. The sparse manual assured me that I had encoded all the mp3's in line with the machines spec's... So I thought maybe the no name batteries I was using were the cause. So I used several different battery types listed in the manual. None seemed to work any better than any other. So I tried plugging it in with the adapter it came with and it played fine...for about 15 minutes until it shut down on its own for no apparent reason...upon checking it I noticed it felt much like I had just pulled out of the oven. So I unplugged it and let it cool off. That was the last time this machine ever worked. Needless to say, I sent it back. I would suggest nobody buy this machine...but oddly enough not for any of the reasons listed above. The biggest insult is...at this point Genica has not responded to any of my two dozen emails to tech support. I sent one asking if there is a way to minimize skipping...no reply. I sent one asking how to get the machine out of record mode as it was stuck even though the switch was on play mode...no reply No reply to the next 22 emails either... My only guess is that Genica did not reply becuase they knew that this was a poor quality machine and that nothing could be done about it... Can I prove that? No. But I can say that I will never ever purchase anything from Genica ever again because of their lack of response to my tech support questions.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars First of it's kind, but suffers from quite a few glitches, December 12, 2000

By 

Bratin Chakrabarti "mr_knowall" (East Coast, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Genica GN803 Tavarua Portable MP3/CD Player (Electronics)

I ordered one the day I knew about it. I was encouraged by an impressive review on ZDTV. But the product suffers from serious glitches. If you are lucky, it'll play for hours without a single skip. But then you are not so lucky all the time. I used it for almost a month because I was impressed by the idea of a MP3 cd player, and this was the only one in the market at that time. I'll give this product 4 stars for being the first of it's kind. But if you are considering buying one of these, I'd recommend that you go with a name brand like Philips, D-link or Memorex.