Customer Reviews

Timex Dual Alarm Clock Radio for Mp3 Songs (Black)

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

It's about time some one released an mp3 alarm clock that's not dependent on the iPod!

There are many good looking and great sounding alarm clocks out there created for iPods -- this is not one of them. It has no special dock for iPod. It does have an audio Line IN port though.

Who is this meant for? And why is it better? First, there are people that don't have iPods out there, who will appreciate ability to wake up to your own mp3 sounds or music. The reason I was looking for a non-iPod mp3 alarm clock is not because I don't have an iPod but because I don't want to mix my music and alarm clock. What if a song that starts playing is too quiet or corrupt? I need reliability when it comes to waking up. What I want to do is copy a few songs or sounds onto the thumb drive put it into this unit and pretty much forget about it.. maybe I'll get tired of those eventually and then I would put new ones, although of course you can fit a lot of music on an SD card or a usb flash drive.

You can select a particular mp3 that you want to wake up to. One reviewer said that an mp3 can lock up the alarm. I suspect this is due to a bad mp3 file that he used. This hasn't happened to me. But I always select the mp3 song that I want to wake up to, and not leave it to random, potentially bad mp3. So I know for sure if it works when I'm selecting it (Timex made it such that it has to play for you to select it). A bad mp3 can lock up any player.

Remote is great. It has a wide beam as I can "snooze" it from another room by pointing at the ceiling.

The clock backlight has several levels, from bright to completely off. When in off, it still shows time but you'll need light to see it (like digital wristwatches).

Sound quality:
It has one speaker. You can not have great sound from one speaker, simply because it's mono. But if you have one cheap speaker, the quality will suffer and will sound harsh. This unit has one nice speaker, so it makes it very pleasant to wake up to the music that has good clarity and smooth sound. When the alarm goes off, the mp3 music gradually fades in until it reaches the set volume. My previous alarm clock just fired up the "ocean waves" sound at the set volume (and I had to look in the manual to figure out what the heck that sound was)

Weakness: This one is present in majority of alarm clocks I've used. The time setting feature. You have a + and a - button, no hour/min switch, not even an AM/PM switch. If it's 2:00 and you want it to be 3:00 you'll need to cycle through 2:01, 2:02, 2:03... when you hold the button for about a second it goes quicker (on my old Timex alarm you had to hold it for like 5 seconds, so guess it's an improvement) I only need to use alarm to wake up to work so usually if I do need to change alarm time it's within an hour or so. If I need to set an alarm for something less important I usually just use my iPhone (which has the best method of setting time/alarm ever) This is a big weakness, but I'm not taking a star off for this, because well, "everybody's doing it".

More nice features:
The picture doesn't have it, but if you use the usb flash drive and lower it into the hole there's actually a removable cover that comes with this alarm clock and it completely covers the hole that you see on the picture.

A+ on aesthetics in general. I read somewhere that this unit looks cheap on close inspection, this is not true. It looks very nice from afar or close up. The sides are silver color but they blend in nicely with the rest of the unit. Snooze button on the top does not stick out like on most alarm clocks, but blends in with the rest of the design. This is one well shaped solid unit. You can put it in most places and it won't ruin the view. It's like some one at Timex decided to actually hire a designer this time. (Just type in "alarm clock" into any search engine to see some ugly beasts... uhh, 99%?)

Bottom line:
At this time I'm not aware of any other non-iPod alarm clock that can play mp3 files other than this. But other than being unique, it is very well designed, visually pleasing, and very nice sounding alarm clock. In other words, it's everything I wanted in an alarm clock so I'm glad I bought it.

Had this alarm clock for a couple of weeks now, and I love it. It's pretty small, about 8" x 4" x 4", and it looks pretty good. Not exactly high design, but tolerable. Mildly retro.

That said, the user interface is simple and intuitive. Flash drive and SD card inputs work well, with easy controls and navigation. Both can remain plugged in at the same time. Flash drive folds down for inconspicuous storage. The sound is OK, for an alarm clock, but I rarely have the volume above about 5. It has a small subwoofer in the back that maybe adds a tiny umph. 8 FM and 4 AM presets. A built in equalizer allows you to choose from about 5 different settings. I find this useful. The remote is very small and thin, and has amazing functionality for its overall simplicity. It can control both sound and alarm functions, allowing you to hit snooze from the other side of the bed.

The dual alarms work well, with the caveat that they must both be set to wake from the same source (radio, mp3, etc). Snooze is 9 min and not adjustable. The snooze button is also used as a dimmer for the display backlight (off + three levels). If the display is too bright at night, it is easy to dim or shut off. This is a nice feature and easy to use.

I have not used the line in jack, because I bought this to play from a flash drive, not an external mp3 player (too much mess on the nightstand). I did a lot of research, payed $75 for this model, and have been very happy with it.

Update: June 22, 2009

I figured out why the mp3 player can lock up. If you do NOT use the "daylight savings time" switch, and change the times manually, it does not lock up. Period. Obviously a software glitch. I've gone back to using this as a player AND alarm clock.

Update: February 6 2008

I'm dropping this thing to two stars (even though Amazon won't let me change the display) because of something that turned up with it: the mp3 player can "lock up" the unit so that neither the clock nor the alarm work. Give Timex credit, they DID mention this can happen in the user's manual, but it doesn't seem to have occurred to them that an unreliable alarm clock is WORSE than useless. If I had known about this before purchase, I'd never have bought the thing. As it is, I'll still use it as a player, but never as an alarm clock.

They get the "almost" and only four stars on two grounds:
1. The button labels are too small for over-50 eyes, and hard to read, even the ones on the front. I would suggest luminescent labels in at least 14point font.

2. Can't change the "snooze" time from a fixed 9 minutes.

Other than those, this unit is an absolute godsend for me and my wife. Dual alarms, programmable "sleep" time in 30-minute increments. I've got to shout this: IT PLAYS MP3 FILES FROM A THUMB DRIVE!!!!!

That's the very feature I bought this thing for. My wife and I like to listen to New Age Ambient music while we drift off to sleep, and it was simple to build mp3s from our purchased CDs, load them into a 2Gig thumb drive and play them with the "sleep" on. We don't have to fumble around changing CDs, the footprint on the headboard is MUCH smaller than a CD player which seems to break down and need replacement once a year.

Sound quality is superb, and it's easy to choose which "subfolder" on the drive you want to start with.

This unit was worth every penny I paid for it.

I picked this unit a few months ago, and initially I was blown away by it. Playing MP3s from a thumb drive is pretty cool. However as noted in other reviews, you have to manually select the wake song since it will not randomly select one each morning. You either have to wake to the same song each morning, or fiddle with it each night to select a different track. It does have a random playback mode when just listening, but not for the alarms. That is pretty irritating. It would have been nice to be suprized by a random song each morning. Another big beef I have is the fixed 9 minute snooze length. I have a habit of hitting the snooze button while I'm still half asleep, and 9 minutes is an awfully long time to snooze. I prefer to set it really short so I don't have time to fall back asleep and then have to get up. Both of these issues can be overlooked for the most part, but the real kicker is I've had this unit lock up on me several times and fail to wake me up in the morning. For an alarm clock, that is beyond unacceptable. If I set it to go off, it darn well better go off. There's nothing quite like the feeling of waking up in the morning only to realize that you are already an hour late for work AND having it happen on more than one occassion. Thanks Timex.

On the positive side, I do like the design of it. It looks nice and has a nice bright display that can be dimmed and even turned off at night. The sound quality of this thing is quite impressive for such a small unit. It is suprisingly full and clear sounding. Most alarm clock radios sound like a cheap blown speaker inside a tin can, but this one actually sounds like real music. It's a real shame I can't depend on it to wake me up. It will probably find its way onto ebay as soon as I find a decent replacement.

I have been on the hunt for a perfect alarm clock for months. Every single one available on the market turned me off in one form or another. Until Timex released this model. I have nothing but praise for Timex

At first glance it seems a bit tiny. It is but do not let this fool you. It sounds pretty amazing considering the size and the fact that it only has one speaker. . The sound is crystal clear. Mp3's sound great. The radio sounds great too. I don't use it for FM/AM however as I have an HD radio just for that purpose.

Finally someone thought too give you the option to shut off the back light completely. Even the lowest setting on most clocks drives me up the wall when I try to sleep. For me this was a dilema, the light drove me crazy but not being able to see the clock worried me in case the alarm failed to sound. This clock includes a full function remote that allows me to turn the light on the clock as needed and off again.

For $80.00 this is a great clock radio. It serves all my needs.

If you're like me, you Googled "mp3 alarm clock" and you got 1000 hits that play cd's you make yourself. Who cares about that? Then you typed in "flash drive alarm clock" and you got this one.

If that is the case, this IS exactly what you are looking for. I am extremely impressed with the feature set of this clock being exactly what they should be.

The flash drive portion works perfectly. Stick a flash drive in it, and it plays the music. Easy as pie.

I did have to look a few things up in the manual to figure them out, but the manual is very good and did answer all my questions. The reason for needing guidance on a few things is Timex got allot of features into the clock while using a very clean interface, so many of the buttons do more than one thing, or require more than one push in order to activate the feature you wanted. But once you know what they are, they make sense and are easy to use and remember.

The two silly flaws are these:
1. There is a compartment in the top of the clock to hide the USB flash drive and keep the look of the clock nice and clean. That's great, but it is exactly too small to store the remote in. We are talking millimeters here. If you are going to use an SD card for your music then this compartment would be empty and if you wanted to store the remote in this compartment, you can't. Not really important, but kinda silly.

2. Much more significant is this: the buttons on the front of the clock beep when you push them. These are the buttons which control the alarm. The beep, is a serious, shrill, loud beep. Think "smoke detector". So it is 4 in the morning, the whole house is asleep, wife is asleep next to me, baby asleep (between us of course), son asleep in the next room. Alarm goes off with nice quiet gentle music no one but me can hear. I can hit the power button and that shuts the music off silently. But the alarm is automatically reset to go off at the same time tomorrow which is a cool feature. However I'm getting up at this rediculous hour because I'm catching a plane and won't be here tomorrow, so I want to turn the alarm off. To do this (in the dark) I need to push the alarm button "BEEEEEEP!!!!!" (Wife jumps and gasps) and you have to push it twice "BEEEEEEP!!!!!" (Baby stirs and starts to whine). Heaven help you if you pushed the wrong button because if you need to keep pushing the family will start to evacuate the house. An absolutely REDICULOUS flaw for an appliance that is very likely to be the only one used in a house where all but one person is supposed to be ASLEEP. And it is this one thing which keeps me from giving the product five stars.

I have actually found it is better to just leave the alarm on in these cases and let wifey deal with it when I'm gone. Because we use the music of our choice it is gentle and quiet and she just shuts it off every morning and goes back to sleep, unlike the BEEEEEEP which gets your heart racing and adreniline flowing and you are never going to get back to sleep for fear of your life.

So anyway, there you go. Really like it, thinking of getting another, and would totally reccomend it to others, but if you have a family, be prepared to work around the outrageous beep of the alarm buttons. Otherwise, it's great.

My Model # is TM-80, don't know how the TM-80b differs.

Since I bought this mainly for its MP3 Playback abilities,
I will focus on that feature.

Points to consider:
1) When powering up, it takes about 15 seconds to scan the
contents of the Media (SD or Flash Plug) before playing begins.

2) Recognized my Kingston 64GB Plug with 6,000+
selections, 30GB+ of MP3s.

3) Has Random & Repeat Options, so you can keep it playing forever.

4) The remote is really handy and works well.
If you're playing MP3s and turn off the unit,
when you turn it back on, it immediately starts playing
in the MP3 mode, though not necessarily at the selection
where you left off.

5) The sound comes set to FLAT, but adjusting to ROCK
improves the Volume & Bass considerably.

6) Has a rather large & heavy power supply:
15.25oz & 3.25" length by 2" wide by 2" deep,
10v 1100ma unregulated.

7) Runs fairly warm but not hot.
I replaced it with a smaller & lighter
"Switching", Regulated Power Supply
9v 1000ma with no problem or heat.

8) Has no headphone jack, should anyone care.


9) Would be nice if it had, as an option,
the ability to connect another speaker for stereo.

Hope this is the start of a trend with other manufacturers,
as the MP3 feature should become standard as external input jacks
have.

-------------------------------------------------------
Bought another radio Jan 2010.
However, the volume control wasn't adjusting the sound properly.

Removed the 6 rear screws holding the case together and
the 4 screws on the circuit board that holds the volume control.

Turns out the volume is controlled with an optical coupling
device that the radio knob crosses about 12 times with each
revolution.

The twin receptor cell was slightly bent and didn't properly
align with the InfraRed LED at the opposite side.
Pushed it up slightly to make it parallel to the LED
(and perpendicular to the circuit board) and now it works OK.

Just passing this on if yours has this problem and you're up
to the challenge.

Purchased from another Amazon store, just wanted to address the MP3 wakeup feature, having seen a few people unhappy with it.

There is no way to select "wake to random mp3", but I get around that by putting a 3 second silent mp3 in the memory, select that as the wakeup track, and set for random play.

Another issue was the lack of tactile feedback for navigating the front panel buttons. I put a small dot of hot glue on a few buttons as landmarks. Works great.

I can't add much to the other reviews. Great sound quality, full featured, minor cons.

If I didn't already own one, I'd buy it again!

I bought this for my wife because it had a USB port and she wanted to be able to listen to podcasts from her flash drive. The unit arrived and seemed to work great for a week or so, but then the AC adapter cable started cutting in and out. If we wiggled the cable it would come on. We returned everything to Amazon and a new unit was promptly sent out. The new radio would not power up at all. Not wanting to try a third time, we returned it and requested a refund. I'm not quite sure why, but they only credited back for 75% of the purchase price.

1st thing's first... The device has 2 alarms that simply work. That's nice for a change. The last few combo alarm-clock / media player devices I've purchased (*cough* especially Homedics) had major flaws when it came to the alarm & snooze functions actually working reliably. The alarm is also nice because the beeper fades in over about 5-10 seconds. The manual seems to say that the alarm will shut off after an hour of snoozing, but I have yet to run into that situation. It seems to just work.

The screen is a backlit lcd type deal with 3 levels of light and a backlight off feature. You cycle through them by hitting snooze.

The mp3 player has several nagging flaws.

It often chokes on files encoded at very high bitrates or encoded by crappy encoders. If you encode everything at 192cbr using Lame or Frauhauffer, you're good. Try a 320 xing encoded mp3 & the device is likely to quit on you. So... if you encode all of your own mp3s at modest bitrates, you're good to go, but if you download anything off of the internet, you're likely to find a file that winamp / windows media player will play, but will cause the mp3 player on the alarm clock to shut off.

The repeat button doesn't make any sense to me. It's been a month & I still haven't figured out what it repeats. Playing the last file on the usb stick seems to shut the device off & playing the last song in a folder seems to make it advance to the next folder. I'm not seeing any difference between the repeat button's on & off state.

The clock has 1 nagging flaw... You can't view it from below. The screen is only viewable from above or parallel with the device. My nightstand is 2 feet higher than the bed, so i can't see my clock unless I tip it down or raise my torso up.

The speaker isn't very good. It's not the worst speaker, but I expected just slightly better. Playing nature cds of rainstorms produces a highly colored sound where the rain is barely audible & the thunder is really loud. I would pay the extra $15 to get a good speaker guys... The sound quality is slightly below that of a standard iHome (also produced by the same company).

I can't complain too much... this is my 3rd device in the category & so far it's the most reliable as an alarm clock. A firmware update would be nice though...