Customer Reviews

RCA RP2458 Portable CD/MP3 Player

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

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!

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.

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.

I was looking for a replacement MP3 CD player for my old one which simply stopped running on batteries. So battery life is my first priority when purchasing. I also wanted a better product since my old one does not display ID3 tags which makes finding a particular song really hard. Then one day I saw this. Wow, it is 50% off. After reading all the excellent feature, I knew this will be my choice. Upon getting the unit, I have done quite a bit of testing with all kinds of different CDs. Commercial CDs, Single and multi-sessioned MP3 and WMA CDs. This player could read them all, although it occasionally had some trouble reading multisession. Give it a couple of more tries and they will work. Battery life is long, approximately 20 hours using 3 AAA Energier 750mAh rechargeable. It even has a backlit LCD, which is really nice. ESP extreme works well overall but there can be skips at the beginning of a song. Sound quality is awesome with DBBS turned on. But, by far the best feature is SmartTrax, the best MP3/WMA CD navigation system ever. To use it, you need to use Musicmatch Jukebox's MP3 burning feature and turn on .MAU list support. Once you have done so, put the disc into the player. And it automatically sorts all the songs into categories like artist, genre, year, title and playlist. It is even better than the NaviTrack those TDK players have. Definitely a great buy.

It would seem my prior review was in haste. The player I received was defective, an unusual anomaly coming from RCA. The mechanism for the laser reader was not moving properly. Amazon.com was extremely helpful and quick to process an exchange for a working model. Having a fully working model, I highly recommend this item, does everything it says, and at this price and set of features it is the best buy for your money, nothing else can beat it. It has more features than models twice the price and really does have excellent sound with the DBBS. I highly recommend it!

This was a product I was wanting to like, really. My first non-PC-based mp3 player was something I really looked forward to. Unfortunately, despite some truly attractive and useful features and generally good performance, I have now shelved the unit for good and will likely return it to Amazon.

First, the Good:
* The SmarTrax navigation system worked tolerably well, a must when playing disks with 200 or more tracks on them. Enough of the track info was displayed to know what I was playing and moving through the list was easy, though sometimes a bit slow.
* Playback was of generally good sonic quality, though it became a little ragged at upper volumes on particularly "hot" tracks.
* The bass boost mode was very helpful when using earphones that are lacking at the lower end of the audible spectrum.

The Bad:
* Setup menu navigation is at times frustrating as the software constantly insists on taking you back to the play screen, forcing you to invoke the menu system over and over to complete your setup.
* The track list doesn't show track titles for CDs, only mp3s. I'm sure such data are available, but the RCA just calls them track 1,2,3...
* The unit turns itself off after only a couple of minutes paused. I don't know if this is a technical requirement to avoid damaging the disc, but I do know getting to track #127 again is a hassle after you pause it to go get a Coke down the hall. RCA might tweak the next generation to allow the unit to remain powered and in stand-by if it's on the AC adapter (as mine was).

The ugly:
* The headphones. Ugh. Non-adjustable, flimsy, poor phone-to-ear connection (indeed if you can even get a connection...I was only able to get the earpads to my ears when I put the 'phones on from the back of my head). If you simply have to have this player, do yourself a favor and get a decent set of 'buds or 'phones.
* Here's the thing that disqualifies this unit, IMHO: it skips. Yes, I know it has a 3/6/13 minute anti-skip, but I'm not talking about physical shock-related skipping, but software glitch skipping. I used this player at my desk at work and it never experienced a shock greater than a dropped pen or telephone handset hang-up. Yet every few minutes a 0.5 second dropout or omission occurred in the music. At times there was a short silence, but most of the time it was as if an entire quarter note was missing from the song. The drop-outs happened on both CD and mp3-encoded discs, home-burned and factory-burned media alike. CD players have been around for 20 years or more...I don't think anyone need tolerate this sort of defect anymore in a player.

Normally, I would have said that for the relatively low price I could live with the quirky menus, irritating automatic shut-off and mystery track names on CDs...I was even willing to pop for a set of good earbuds. But when I found my teeth grinding at yet another sonic hiccup in the middle of Warren Zevon's artful piano riffs in "Frank and Jesse James," I knew this player's days were numbered.

I will note I have not tried WMA files, but MP3 works great! On most CD's, you can fit 200-250 tracks, and this player is an inexpensive and great value

PROS
~~It allows you to sort by Artist, Album, Track name, and Genre (Genre is pop, rock, rap, etc.) and you can file through the songs
~~Play options, (repeat, shuffle, etc.) are numerous and good
~~VERY EASY to use, if by an off-chance you are baffled, the included manual is great to console.
~~Rechargable batteries (Not-included) can be recharged while still inside the player
~~Great Surround Sound or DPS
~~Allows excellent choice of preferences, such as backlight-timed, Autoplay, etc.
~~AC Adapter included, kinda bulky, but it needs to be to function. Never-the-less, the included AC Adapter works perfect
~~

CONS
~~I'm not feeling too trusty of the fact you must force the CD down and force it back up, what happened to the great "PUSH" button that poppped it up?
~~Sometimes the CD doesn't play automatically and you have to press the play button 2 or 3 times
~~I'm not ranting, but there is this sticker on the Player that advertises the type of program it uses (I'm not mad at the program, it's actually very goo!) but when you peel off the sticker it leaves a horrible residue, but it can be cleaned off with a simple cleaning spray.

Now here is what you will need to fix on your own
~~I'm not to lie to you, these are possibly the worst headphones I have ever used. Buy some new ones, it'll be worth it

~~#1 THING /PAY CLOSE ATTENTION\~~I suggest you buy a stress ball, because this software... ARGH! It makes you want to use the disc as a frisbee! It is the buggiest thing ever, especially on below a Windows 98. Get something else, or a better version of Musicmatch, because you will go insane attempting to fix this

All in all it gets a 4 1/2, A great value for your hard earned-money and a great accesory for any music lover.

I was looking for a new mp3/cd player because my other one broke, So I bought this one because it was cheap and looked nice.

Positives:

- Nice Look
- Can play mp3/cds
- Slim
- ** Has backlit screen, so you can see in the dark

Now for the many negatives

Negatives:

- THERE IS NO FREAKIN HOLD BUTTON, this means, if you have this in your backpack or something, it will turn on and waste batteries.

- THE LOADING takes atleast 40 seconds on MP3 CDS. Sometimes, the songs won't work also so you have to wait like 5 minutes before any of the songs can play.

- IT FREEZES. This mother freezes so many times. If are playing a song and exit out of the menu, it freezes. Then you have to load the cd again ( which takes another 45 seconds ).

- The CD OPEN BUTTON is really EASY TO mistakingly hit and open the cd player. It's very big. Plus if you open the cd player,
it LOADS UP AGAIN!

- One of the worst things besides the NO HOLD BUTTON is the battery life span. It uses 3 TRIPLE A batteries. Not only does the triple A battery not last long but they are more expensive. I put NEW batteries in this CD PLAYER on MONDAY. I listened to it say 30 minutes everyday on the bus. On friday, the batteries were dead. That's like 2 1/2 hours of battery life.

Conclusion:

I'm being nice giving it 2 stars. This is the worst CD player i've ever had. Even my first CD player I ever bought is better than this junk. The batteries price will add up making this cheap player's price equal to a good one. So save your money and buy a good MP3 CD Player

Excellent cd player, very high quality. The sound is great, with a nice bass and treble boost and high volume controlled by buttons instead of a wheel, which is nice. The battery life is amazingly long, and all you have to do is buy 3AAA rechargeables because it recharges them itself when you plug it in. It is very lightweight and thin, easy to carry around. It is a bit larger than the size of the cd, though. The buttons are all right in one area where your thumb goes, so they are easy to find and operate.

It has good mp3 capabilities, and an easy navigation system that displays the track info from ID3 tags embedded in your mp3s. The navigation is a bit slow, though. The software(MusicMatch) is [aweful], get a different program, I recommend 'TagScanner'(download.com) for ID3 tagging your songs. There is also a noticable pause between mp3 songs, up to about 5 sec sometimes.

The display is nice, only song names that are too long get cut off so put the song title first when naming your songs. It has a very nice backlight that can be turned on by pressing any button. It also has a nice options menu that you can navigate through while listening your music.

The headphones are also [aweful], but you can easily buy a better pair of those.

The only problem I've had with it is this: When I first burned an mp3 cd and played it, It would play part of the way through the song, then cut off and skip to the next song. It also would occasionally take a 3 sec segment of a song and switch it with another 3 sec segment of the song later in the song. When I played one of my mom's cd's, i realised that it was the type of cd i was using that caused this. So if you are having problems like this, buy a higher quality brand of cd like Memorex and it should work.

I purchased this product as I was going travelling. I started to use the MP3 player in late June. By early August, it has stopped working. It didn't fall, get water damaged or anything - it just stopped. Wouldn't recommend at all. As I'm currently abroad for 12 months, I have had to replace it at my own expense and am not happy about this.