Customer Reviews

Koss CDP-3100 Personal CD/MP3 Player with Lid Top Digital Controls

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(12)

 

 

The Koss CDP3000 is worth what you pay for it. If you can't shell out the hundred-fifty dollars for an MP3/CD player with ID3 tag or filename support, then consider this one. It has the usual drawbacks, such as that it takes some time to spin up the CD and read the structure (somewhere between 10 and 40 seconds, depending on the CD, and sometimes it gets stuck during this process, but turning it off and them back on fixes this). The manual says it supports bitrates from 32K to 256K, including VBR. I tested a fair variety of different MP3s on it, and everything I tried except those with the new MP3Pro format worked. The anti-skip function is pretty good, but not perfect. The headphones are passable, but most people will want to spend twenty bucks on a pair of Sony's. (If you can afford fifty dollar or more headphones, then you should be able to afford a better MP3/CD player). I've gone through two sets of batteries so far, one lasted quite a while, and the other went very quickly, so I suspect the second set were just bad batteries. The navigation system is pretty good, it sorts by directories on the CD (calling them 'albums'). The random play feature only has one function, which plays all the tracks in one album in a random order, then switches to the next album. This product includes *no* software, and crappy documentation. It does have a line-out, and it includes an A/C adapter. For those who saw my earlier review, the problems I had were due to the way I burned the CDs -- don't use DirectCD to create MP3 CDs, it doesn't create CDs that follow the appropriate standards.

I gave it 4 stars but it could be 5 stars for the price. I've used a few players jwill, casio, memorex at the time they all cost a lot more than this and it beat them all. The rio at the time was much more. It was much better but it cost alot more. The lowdown on this unit:

Good:
No skips walking, biking, offroad biking, driving
plays dozens of different mp3 types, bitrates, media, burners
plays VBR up to 320kb or so
much better than all the others mentioned above except rio.

good navigation through directories

The bad
eats batterys. Usually seems to be 2 hrs. max was 5 hrs straight with kodak gold batteries.
no wma
no id3 tags.
no packet written disks
dont drop it. (i'm on my second one)
will not play r3mix mp3s reliably. I think its just to much compression processiong for its little cpu.

Bottom line
You can now get rio's for around less than they were with full id3 support
and the low end sp50 rio for about less as well. I haven't used the specific model but I hear its very good and based on much of their earlier model. I would go for the rio unless you get this koss really really cheap.

I purchased this product on sale at my local Target last month. So far I've had three problems, 1) I dropped it three times from a distance of about three feet and while it continued to play (awesome bufferring and anti skip) for several seconds the disc did suffer some damage as it came free within the device and became severely gouged as it continued to spin. 2) another issue is that it wont recognize more than 93 mp3 files per disc, the manual says that it supports 99 tracks per album, but i haven't had success yet in burning a cd-r with the multiple albums that the player can recognize. 3) I only use this device with the power adapter that came with the device (a big plus), but I did use Energizer Titanium batteries just to test it and it ate them up with in 6 hours of use. I thought that was rather too quick for my taste. The great features include 1)the right price, 2)compact design, 3)ease of operation, 4)nice packaging(comes with fair quality headphones, i do recommend upgrading though, and a AC power adapter), other features include a hold switch(temporarily disables buttons), a DBBS switch (extra bass), a line out port, and the usual programming options. I recommend this product at the right price.

I recently purchased a Koss 3000 series CDR/CDRW/MP3 player. It is very bare bones, but I am satisfied. I have read some of the reviews here. The problem lies in that technical support for Koss is very poor. I too had some trouble burning a CD with MP3's sucessfully. I finally had luck using MusicMatch Jukebox, with MP3 quality selected (96 kbps), and Normal processing selected for encoding (under Advanced menu). My files are organized on the CD as follows: one folder per album, with respective MP3's per album underneath each folder. I read the review about 8.3 naming convention -- my player WAS able to read extended file names, just make sure the leading portion of the file name is unique. For example, my files are named 01(track number)_song title_album_artist.mp3. Again, long file names are OK, including spaces. Anyway, this is a good purchase. I also bought 2 AA NiMH rechargeable batteries and recharger instead of an AC adapter (neither of which came with the unit). All in all a great value, since I am planning to put around 10 hours of music on one CD. Also, I read that some folks are experiencing poor quality sound. I do not notice anything out of the ordinary. Folks, please understand that MP3 can be near-CD quality. The MP3 format will at best closely replicate CD quality sound. Notice the drastic differences in files sizes between an MP3 file and a CD track. That is partially why you may hear a faint echo, or other anomolies -- that is normal and is a trade-off with MP3's. If you don't like the quality, stick with the original CD recording. As for clicking sounds -- try adjusting the sampling rate and/or other settings with your CD ripping software. Now, back to the product... I am happy with my purchase, and recommend it with some caution -- be prepared to spend some time working out the kinks if you plan to listen to MP3 files. Your patience will pay off...

This is a great entry-level MP3/CD Player. ...The Koss doesn't have the flashy case or the large LCD screen, but I still like it better than the Expanium. It is much simpler to use, and it has better battery life as well (the Expanium has only 10 hours). It is also noticeably lighter and thinner than the Expanium, which is also a big plus. It has a slower boot time (the time it takes from when you turn the player on until when the music starts to play) than the Expanium, but there is almost no delay what-so-ever between tracks. ...I have had no trouble at all with any of my burned cds; they all play fine. As for the "electronics fan from New Jersey", he needs some serious help if he can't make an MP3 cd correctly. It is a totally no-brainer process, so don't believe what he says. I only have had two problem this CD player. 1) that if there are any long, noticeable scratches on the CD, the player will sometimes misread these and suddenly go from 3:23 on track 5 to 3:24 on track 6; but that rarely happens. and 2) it cannot read ID3 tags (song name, artist, and album information). However, all in all, this is a great MP3/CD player, and the price is right.

I'm new to the world of MP3 CD players, and if this is how they all work, I'm going back to straight CDs. I spent nearly an entire day trying to get a CD-R encoded to work with the darn thing. What frustration. And when I finally -did- get a CD-R burnt that worked with it, the sound quality was reminiscent of a walkie talkie. LAME. There was this weird echo effect present in the MP3 playback that does not exist when the very same CD-R is taken to a desktop PC and played there. Also, the sound quality on CDs is bad, too. FWIW, I used RealJukebox Plus to encode from CD to MP3, and then used CDRWIN to burn the MP3s to CD-R.

This KOSS unit is a shame, because I bought the KOSS unit since I was so pleased with their standard CD player, which costed me [price]. This unit, at [price] from my local ... store, is not worth more than [price] IMHO. I'm returning it tomorrow and picking up either the Philips/Magnavox unit, or the RCA unit. But this one is a reject.

... The sound is good, anti-skip in CDA mode works well, the player seems reasonably durable. I found no problems with it recognizing long-file-names, though I've found it's helpful to start each track with a number '01 - blah', etc; otherwise, the player can be unpredictable in it's ordering of tracks. All in all though, I'm reasonably impressed.

...The player is great!!!! when you don't expect too much!!!!!!
Reads CDR containing about 300 mp3 files approx.30 sec, CDRW - little longer. Sound quality is GOOD! but don't count on EQ !!! Display rather small but shows everything what I need to know what's going on, no search by song name, album or artist but how could you expect anything like this for 29.99?????!!! besidesyou can try to organize your mp3 files on CDR a little bit putting them into folders which are called by this player as "albums". not bulky at all, rather light and slim I would say, runs very nicely and DOES NOT skipp AT ALL in mp3 mode!!!I am going to send this player as a gift for my friend living in Europe since all mp3/cd players are far more expensive there. If you don't need ID tag support and "good sound" is good anough for you - just GO for it! For such price you can't go wrong!!!!!!!!

So many dissatisfied reviews up here, I'm glad I didn't read them before I bought this thing. It took a little messing around (very little) with Easy CD Creator, but I've found that the player does everything advertised. As I type, I'm playing a CD-RW with a dozen subdirectories (it wasn't clear that this is what the instructions mean by "album", but another post here straightened me out on that) containing a total of 112 mp3s. JOLIET format, which somebody said you couldn't do, with long filenames (max. 64 char, I guess), which somebody else said you couldn't do. Sounds fine, not quite CD quality, but that's to be expected. Also haven't noticed the skips or pops people are complaining about, but it's too soon to judge that.

I haven't tried pushing the limit on number of tracks yet-- to eager to try it out. maybe that will break it. Also, I haven't been running or otherwise shaking the box (let alone whacking it as some posts here have described) so I can't really speak to the anti-skip or the unfortunate metal plate. However, if you're not planning on working out with this player (or whacking it) and you want to put a Boston-NYC train ride's worth of music on a single, re-writable CD, this is a nifty unit for the price.

This is the perfect player! ... It doesn't read ID3 tags, but it starts up in 6 or 7 seconds because it doesn't have to read all the ID3 tags. That is an advantage of Mp3/CD players that don't have ID3 capability.

Once I got mine, I burned a couple MP3 cd's with about 13 seperate albums (so over 100 mp3's) and they all work fine. The anti-shock is what you'd expect for 40/25 seconds. IT SKIPS IF YOU SHAKE IT FOR MORE THAN 40 SECONDS! It doesn't skip if you are walking with it. Whoever said the antiskip doesn't work must not know anything about antiskip. As for the sound, it is awesome. The base boost makes it a ton better. It plays normal cd's very well, there is no difference between how it plays normal cd's and MP3 cd's except MP3 cd's take a couple seconds to boot up.

Overall, it is the ideal Mp3/CD player because it's cheap, it works, and it has good sound. Go buy it