RCA RP2458 Portable CD/MP3 Player

Other products by RCA

Product Details

Product Manual [380kb PDF]

• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S. and to APO/FPO addresses. For APO/FPO shipments, please check with the manufacturer regarding warranty and support issues.
• ASIN: B00008P8MH
• Item model number: 2458
• Batteries: 2 AA batteries required.
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #69,296 in Electronics (See Bestsellers in Electronics)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #52 in

  Electronics > Portable Audio & Video > Portable CD Players > MP3-CD Players

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes
• Date first available at Amazon.com: March 4, 2003

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description
The metallic silver RCA RP2458 portable CD player combines eye-catching slim styling and advanced features like support for MP3 and Windows Media Audio formats. Up to 13 minutes of esp-Xtreme skip protection (with WMA files recorded at 64 kbps; three minutes for standard CD audio; and six minutes for MP3 at 128 kbps) makes this CD player virtually skip-free in most conditions and a great choice for joggers and runners.

The CD player also features SmartTrax, a navigation technology for quickly accessing specific songs or playlists among the hundreds of tracks on an MP3-encoded CD-R/CD-RW. Using a library of computer-generated identification tags to identify digital audio files by title, artist, album, year, genre, and track number, the SmartTrax file management system can "read" song data from recordable CDs, letting you view song data and create playlists at the touch of a button. SmartTrax-supported products can read the song data even before the song is played, an exclusive feature of the new system. A four-line dot-matrix display shows SmartTrax data and allows track/folder programmability with a random playback option.

Other playback features include Digital Bass Boost Surround for extra low-end slam and added musical depth and a hold switch to prevent unintended interruptions in playback and save batteries by negating playback when the player is stopped. Supplied with the player are X-Phone stereo headphones, which sit comfortably behind your head without slipping forward. The unit operates for approximately 15 hours on three AAA batteries (not included).

Product Description
This RCA personal CD player makes it easy to choose which of your MP3s you want to listen to. SmartTrax is a new type of navigation that lets you quickly access the songs that you want to listen to amongst the hundreds of tracks on your MP3 CD. With SmartTrax, a table of contents is created using the ID3 tags - this table of contents may include the title of the song, artist, album, year, genre, track number and a comment field. This table of contents can then be sorted based on the information that is available in the ID3 tags. In addition to playing your MP3 CDs, this personal CD player is also compatible with CD-R/CD-RW, and WMA.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best CD/MP3/WMA Player!!, April 16, 2003

By	Arturo Monterroso T. (Guatemala/Central America) - See all my reviews

I finally got it, and when I got it out of the box I knew it was a winner. Sound quality with audio cd's and mp3 cd's is superb. The interface is easy to use, even without reading the manual I figured it out. The screen is well lited and shows everything you need, it even has animations! The player has a sturdy feel and it weights very little. The headphones sound good too, but I replaced them for the Sony MDR - G51 streetstyle over-the-neck headphones because I feel thay are a bit superior from the ones you get. An outstanding product over-all, I highly recommend it.
Buy it!

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Damn good machine, June 17, 2003

By	Big Brooklyn Lou (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews

Construction: Once you hold it in your hand you'll be amazed at both how light and well constructed this player is. The top half of the player is a beatiful brushed aluminum and when it closes you can barely see a seam. If you've ever owned a CD player that has had the top part break off get loose or the plastic securing clasps snap, you'll appreciate how the unit is made. The door is connected to the top part of the unit by a thick bar and metal hinges that are part of the unit's top. The unit has two clasps that are also made out of metal and are part of the top. In other words there are no plastic parts on the door part of the unit that can break. This unit is made to last a good long time.

Sound Quality: Excellent. Nuff said.

Cool Feature #1: Built in battery recharger. Go to Radio Shack, get 3 AAA rechargeable batteries and stick them in the unit. Hit the charge button and in a few hours you're ready to go. No more batteries to buy. Plus the thing holds a charge for a good long time. The unit comes with its own AC charger, which isn't always the case for players in this price range.

Cool Feature #2: Built in DSP effect button for MP3's. Sound too high? Hit the bass effect. Too bassy? Hit the Surround effect. Sound ok? Leave it on normal.

Cool Feature #3: Push button volume (no silly wheels). It also has a secondary Line Out jack that pushes out the sound at a low but steady volume in case you want to plug the unit to a tape adapter in your car. The reason this is cool is since the volume is controlled and low, you actually conserve battery life. The unit should play alot longer hooked up to your car than with headphones.

Cool Feature #4: Adjustable backlit display. Adjustable in that you can set contrast as well as the time (from 3-10 seconds) it takes to shut itself off. The 'Enter' button triggers the backlit display when the unit is playing. If you've ever tried to find a particular song while driving at night you will appreciate this feature.

Cool Feature #5: Ease of physical navigation. Someone at RCA took an ergonomics class and kept good notes. The unit is designed to be easily operated with one finger. All the buttons are clearly marked and arranged in a small crescent around where you're thumb would be if you were holding the player. No need to hunt around for buttons hidden in strange places on the player.

Cool Feature #6: Ease of file navigation. Whatever way you saved and organized your mp3 files on the disk is how you'll find them on the player. It also uses the SmartTrax system to sort the files by album artist and genre irregardless of how the files were saved on the disk.

Overall, for the price that Amazon is selling it for, this is a steal. The unit is easily worth twice as much just on sound qulaity and construction alone.

Is the player perfect? Close. The minor annoyances I have with the unit are:

* The Headphones suck. Toss'em. They're that bad. Hey RCA had to hold costs somewhere. I'm glad they skimped on the headphones rather than the unit.

* Screen scrolls up and down, but not left to right. If you are not going to use the SmarTrax system and just plan to drop mp3 files onto a disk, When you make your CD's, make sure that you name the file with the name of the song first and create folders to organize your songs.

* At first I thought it would be great if it had a remote, but after playing with it I stopped wishing it had one. Since the thing is so light and can be operated by my thumb it doesn't really need one.

Basically RCA sacrificed the remote and the headphones to give you a superior player with an AC adapter and built in battery charger. Smart move on their part.

PS - I've already purchased three of these. One for myself and the other two for jealous family members. Yes, its that good.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great value - hope it lasts., June 17, 2003

By	J. Williams (New York, NY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Was all ready to purchase a Panasonic model (SL-MP70) having had better luck with their portable CD players in the past than anyone else's, when I came across this RCA. I've honestly never purchased an RCA product before and was unsure of their reputation these days. But what sold me was the display - with a lot of MP3's on a disc, ID tags are an absolute must and a 4 line display is certainly helpful. When I read from the comments here that it also had backlighting (the Panasonic doesn't), well, that clinched it.

I have not been disappointed so far and for [the money]I feel this is a great deal. All aspects of this player's performance have been excellent. The display is bright and clear and really does give a lot of info, including scrolling album title, year and genre (provided it's all in the ID tag). The sound quality is great - assuming you use your own headphones, as the ones that come with the player are absolute trash (this shouldn't surprise you at this price point - I have a pair of Koss Portapros that I use for portables). It is loud enough to hear fine in the NYC subway, and this is often a sticking point for me in portable CD players (returned 2 Sony models to the store a couple years ago because of it). The build quality is better than I expected for [the money] and it looks pretty slick too.

I only hope it holds together - it does have a quality feel at first but the more you use it the more you appreciate the engineering that went into making it feel like it's better built than it actually is. The buttons, for example, are nice and stiff - but they occasionally click oddly if you don't press them exactly right (like the equivalent of cracking a knuckle - as if you've clipped a piece of interior plastic a bit). The laser assembly makes a loud cranking noise when it's moving - it's not smooth at all. And on my player, anyway, there is dust and smudging underneath the exterior glass on the display - there's no way to clean this out. Still, except for the dirt under the glass - probably unique to my unit - this player feels like it should cost more than it does.

About the only real performance-related complaint I can make is that the pause between MP3 songs is quite long - about 4-5 seconds or so - making listening to some continous albums a bit different than the way the artist originally intended. All you can really do is rip to one continuous track if you want to get rid of these pauses, as it seems the player seeks to the beginning of each track individually, loads it into memory and then stops spinning the disc. It's the constant spinups/seeks at the track starts that cause the pauses.

Otherwise, though, great player for the price. The functionality of the display is better than anything else at this price point or perhaps any other price point in a CD-based MP3 player, and the music sounds great. It also has handled all sorts of MP3's I've thrown at it so far; CBR, VBR, up to 320k/sec. I haven't tried WMA (nor will I probably ever) and I haven't even tried a regular CD (I bought it mainly for MP3 CD's), but I have no reason to believe it would handle these any differently than it does MP3's. I highly recommend this as a budget player; I just hope mine lasts me a good long time.