Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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57 of 57 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
powerful and inexpensive, November 25, 2001
By A Customer
This machine has features on machines costing much more, and some that they don't even have. A zoom function is included which many machines even costing more do not have. Another nice feature is the remote has a type of volume control, many DVD remotes have absolutely no way to control volume meaning the need for two remotes by the armchair. The remote here controls the audio output from the DVD. Even though a universal remote would be better this works adequately. So far I have had no problems with the machine, playing DVD's and CD's flawlessly. I have no experience with playing MP3's. The inexpensive price is quite a plus too. Highly recommended
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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Big Disappointment, December 21, 2001
By A Customer
In November 2001, I bought the Apex AD-3201 on sale for (...). I liked the advertised numerous features and connectors on this model. I bought it mainly to play DVD's and MP3's. I hooked it up to my 27" Hitachi that also has a lot of "bells and whistles." I connected the audio cables and S-Video cable. The first DVD movie I popped in worked great, ... for the first 57 minutes. The AD-3201 then locked up, and the picture was frozen on the screen. None of the controls on the remote would work, and none of the controls on the unit itself worked, except the "Power" button. I had to turn the power completely off, and then on to restart the DVD movie. I fast-forwarded the movie to the elapsed time setting where it had frozen, and watched the rest of the movie. I checked the DVD disc for dirt or scratches, but there was nothing wrong with the disc. I also noticed that every so often, the AD-3201 would pause about a quarter to a half second, and then continue playing the DVD. It would do this several times during the 12 different DVD's I watched on it. I figured I could live with the short pauses, but was concerned with the total freeze-up. I then tried numerous MP3 discs. I wasn't impressed with the self-coding eight letter designation that it gave each MP3 song, but again, I could live with that. I noticed that I had to crank the volume WAY up to listen to the MP3 songs. They sounded just okay; I wasn't impressed. They didn't sound as good as they did on my computer, which has a much smaller sound system. It was annoying if you forgot to turn the volume down after listening to MP3's, as the TV volume would be extremely loud. For the same volume level as the TV set to "18," the MP3's had to be set to "40." (This is the Hitachi TV volume level, with the volume setting on the AD-3201 set to the midway point, via the AD-3201 remote).
The Apex AD-3201 played MP3's burned as low as 32kbps to ones burned as high as 320kbps. The one glaring problem with this unit was that it "stuttered" before playing each MP3 song. It would play a half second of the first part of each MP3 song, and then start over and play the entire song. It did this every time. That was the straw the broke the camel's back. I just couldn't put up with that. Some will say that maybe I burned the MP3's the wrong way; nope, I even researched and checked that, hoping that maybe this was the problem, as I really wanted to give this Apex unit a chance.
I got onto Apex's message board, and started reading the many posts about the different Apex models. From November into December, the posts were about 95% negative on the different Apex models, most having the exact same problems. (Some problems were caused by the ignorance of the new user. The owners manual leaves a lot to be desired). The 1000 was the worst. The 1500 was not doing well, and the 3201 was a little better, but other posters had the exact same problems that I had with my 3201. These problems were not fixable. (The fix was to return it). It was either design flaws or poor quality control. At that point, I was not feeling too good about my AD-3201 that I had for two weeks.
I bought a Daewoo DVG-5000N for the same price as the Apex AD-3201, as it had all the same features and connectors as the Apex AD-3201. It even had a Karaoke feature. I tested it alongside the Apex AD-3201. Before this, I had nothing to compare to the Apex unit. The Daewoo 5000N worked absolutely wonderful. On DVD movies, it never locked up or paused once. I liked the way it labeled my MP3 songs as compared to the cryptic way the Apex did. The MP3 sound quality was much, much better. I can't emphasize that enough. I was surprised there was that much of a difference. The Daewoo never "stutters" before any of the MP3 songs like the Apex does. I didn't have to crank the volume control up on the Daewoo like I did the Apex. Without another DVD player to compare the Apex player with, I would not have realized the shortcomings of the Apex AD-3201. I'm sure there are other DVD players as good or better than the Daewoo 5000N, but the Apex AD-3201 in my opinion is not acceptable, even at a much lower price. And for those who are happy with their Apex units, I'm glad you got one of the few good ones, but how long will they hold up until you also have problems. It will then be too late to return them for a refund. I took my Apex AD-3201 back for a refund, and kept the Daewoo, which I might say is still operating flawlessly, (knock on wood). As for the karaoke feature on my Daewoo, I tried it out. It worked great. You'd be surprised what a little added reverb can do to anyone's voice. I put an Elvis tune in, and "Thank you, ah thank you very much!"
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I guess I'm lucky - I love it!, April 28, 2002
I realize that many people have had trouble with Apex units in general, and with the AD-3201 in particular, but I'm not one of them. It has played every DVD, VCD, SVCD, CD-R and CD-RW I've thrown at it, including 80 minute ones. It has never stuttered during playback, and sound and video quality is excellent.I bought mine in mid 2001, and I convinced my local techie store to let me set up multiple units side-by-side for comparison. I auditioned at all the MP3 compatible units they were selling back then since my primary interest was in a player for my 100+ MP3 CD's. Obviously, audio quality was paramount. I agree that song names are mangled horribly when displayed, but all the other units at that time did the same thing, often worse, although there may be more capable units out there now in this regard. At least it does subdirectories - one of the players I looked at treated an MP3 CD as one big directory no matter how the disk was actually organized, simply assigning a number to each track. I solved the mangling problem, satisfactorily for me anyway, by writing a CD cataloging program to list the songs and albums, and which also listed the same song number for each track that the APEX unit would show on screen. Now I have no trouble finding or skipping to a track. I suspect this and other similar players can only read the MP3 directory as an ISO 9660 disk, ignoring the Joliet long names that would make the display more readable. Note that this player doesn't display MP3 tags either. The reason I chose this player over units even 2 or 3 times the price was the audio quality, simply head and shoulders above the others. As I said, MP3 capability was more important to me than video perfomance at that time. That said, I have been more than satisfied with the unit in the latter area as well. I have noticed two issues that other reviewers complained about, but neither has been a showstopper for me. First, in over 9 months of regular use, on 3 or 4 occasions the player has randomly turned on subtitles, although I don't know what button combinations triggered this. Also, I play a lot with home-burned SVCD's (which play beautifully on this unit BTW) and as reported elsewhere here, if the SCVD is ejected, reburned, and reinserted, the player will occasionally lose audio completely and play a few seconds of video, then pause a few seconds, play, then pause... etc. Powering off and on fixes this, and I have never had this problem when playing multi-disk SVCD movies back-to-back, for instance. All told, I am more than satisfied with this unit for its ability to beautifully play MP3's encoded at any bitrate(including VBR), and also that it flawlessly handles my newly found passion, SVCD's. When I finally get a DVD writer, I'm fairly confident this player will be up to the task too. BTW - for those that are wondering, although instructions for changing the region code and turning off macrovision on older APEX players have been available on the web for some time, such information for the AD-3201 didn't exist initially. Note however that these instructions have finally made it onto many DVD hacking sites, making this unit even more attractive for the DVD aficionado.
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