Customer Reviews

jWIN JXCD573BLK Portable MP3/CD Boombox with AM/FM Radio, Cassette Player and USB/SD/MMC (Black)

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I wanted an all-in-one unit so I could I play my old time radio show Cassettes, CDs and MP-3s on and this was the device for me. It will even play your Memory Chips as well. If I had any complaint, or should I say, recommendation, that would be for larger (possibly embalsed) lapels for the various buttons; like the Skip or Stop, as an example. In addition, I like that I can connect, through the headphone plug provided, speakers through that jack. This allows me to place one of the speakers next to my bed. [Note: Doing this, does disable the existing speakers]. To wrap this review up; I highly recommend this player.

I bought this few weeks back and I am satisfied with this product for the price I paid. Here are some aspects to consider before you buy.

Positives:
-It plays mp3 from CD, SD Card and Flash drive (USB)
-Has an auxillary input (in case you want to connect your mp3 player to it)
-Plays cassettes (this was an important requirement for me as I have lots of old cassettes that I can't discard)

Negatives:
-The very first dissapointment was the blue LCD display -- IT IS VERY HARD TO SEE ANYTHING, you can only read stuff if you are at a certain angle -- even then, it is very light. This is defenitely the biggest problem.
-No Remote Control -- I wish there was a remote control
-The switch to change the input(play) mode is cheap quality. I'm afraid if it will break in a few months of usage.

But again, for the price I paid this is the only available player with all the features (especially with cassette player).

I bought this player about 3 months ago so I can listen to my music from a SD card. The player does have decent sound, and looks really decent. SD cards read in almost no time, CD's play just fine. Even thumb drives never gave me any trouble.

However, I do have a couple of problems.

First: The shuffle feature on this could be better. It works, but sometimes it seems to want to play the same songs over and over again, even though you have over 100 songs.

Second: This is what really got me to rate this player lower then it could of been rated. The screen is crap. You can not see anything unless you look from the top down onto the screen. If you look at the screen dead on, you can't see nothing. I contacted JWin for which I get a response: "This is not a defect, rather normal operation of this unit". I guess you aren't supposed to see any of the words on the screen.

In short, I am happy with this player for what I use it for. But if you want to see what song or track you are playing, you may need to look down the line for another player.

I bought this boombox about a month ago and I have enjoyed it quite a bit. I was looking for a relatively cheap boombox that had mp3-cd and usb drive capability. Using a 4 gb usb flash drive I found that the boombox can read a maximum of 2.5 gb of music. Not sure if it matters but the mp3's I had on the usb drive were all 128 kbps. So I guess it can accept larger then 2.5 gb drives but will only play the music when there is 2.5 gb or less of music on the drive. If you try to put more then 2.5 gb of music on a drive the boombox wont play the music. I hardly ever use the radio on these boomboxes but when I did the boombox seemed to find plenty of stations and they came in clear. I found that inserting the batteries was a bit of a pain because the battery compartment is so tight that you have to hold one battery firmly against the spring while you insert the battery next to it. The usb slot could be in a better spot because when inserted the usb drive sticks straight out the front of the boombox creating the potential for it to break off. The only other complaint is that the boombox could use a bit more volume, because to me the only way the get the music to play at a decent volume was the use the "Jazz" and "Pop" presets. Its a great boombox for an office and its pretty good for louder environments as long as your relatively close to the boombox and the environment isnt extremely noisy.

First off, let's consider that this item does a lot for under $40. I agree that the LCD display is not always clear and I sometimes have to angle the unit against the light to see it. I wish the tape cover was clear so I could see how much tape is left. I also have found that the power plug doesn't have a strong enough connection and if you move the unit, it might unplug itself. I have not tried to use the thumb drive yet, but I have used it with my ipod and an audio transfer cable and the results are acceptable. I mainly bought this unit so I could transfer tapes to my computer and then download them to a CD, and it works fine for those needs. The only reason I give this 4 stars is because of the low price; but you cannot expect a $40 unit to perform like the more expensive ones. So I think when a review it made, it needs to be against comparable units in the same price range.

Right on the box there is a sticker that says "Quality Assurance jWIN" What does that mean? "Quality Assurance Not Likely!! LOL. I bought a unit and when we opened it up the tape unity was slightly ejected. We pushed it back in and heard a click. We were like Okay it might be nothing. We stuck the tape in and pressed play and the unit proceeded to eat my tape. So we sent that unit back and decided what the heck lets give jWIN another chance. So, the unit arrived today and it would not play any Cd's it just said no CD. I tried over 10. They all play in my other 2 players. The manual troubleshooting says if it does not play a cd then wait for an hour in case fog is on the lens. We did and it still does not work. Do not waste your time with this junk!

It works and so far all functions seem to do what they are supposed to. I bought this primarily to play MP3's from an SD chip. It does that pretty well but is a little slow to seek. I'm not sure large of an SD card it will read but I am using a 2gig Kingston formatted in FAT32 with no problem.

The labels are difficult to see and would have been MUCH better if they were white. The tuner is all analog and the radio would have been 2X as nice if they could have incorporated the tuner into the digital display. While on the subject of the display, all other comments are on target - it's weak. If you are not looking straight at it you will have trouble reading it.

The manual is fair. I powered up the box for the first time and was greeted with "WAIT" message on the display. It seemed odd that a boom box would need to initialize since I had not touched a single button or inserted anything that required reading, accessing, or spinning up. I figured the engineers must have incorporated something I had not seen before, so like an obedient idiot I waited - and waited - and waited - and waited for the message to clear while flipping through the manual in search of an explanation. I found nothing about the message and finally slipped my SD card in the slot to see what would happen. Sure enough the message cleared and it started playing. The manual contained several example messages but nothing that mentioned "WAIT." It would have been nice to see a reference to the message somewhere. I'm no dummy but I sure felt like one. It was trying to tell me in broken English that it was waiting or looking for a memory device, such as a flash drive or SD card.

The sound is decent but not outstanding, and the volume is fine for the average listening area but this is no party box.

This is a stretch but I wish it had a preamp output so I could digitize some very old to my computer.

Practically plays every type of media and does it well. The blue screen is not as bad as some people make it out to be. Decent sound. Right for the price.

I purchased this unit specifically because I planned to listen to audio books made in the MP3-CD format. I was surprised to find out that it cannot play the audio books produced by some of the major producers -- such as Blackstone Audio and Bolinda. For each of those disks, the jWin unit cycles through the tracks on the disk (taking about 8 seconds per track, and showing the track numbers one at a time) and stops at the last track. When I attempt to play the disk, there is no sound, and instead the unit simply cycles through each track again. The format used by those publishers appears to be quite conventional, and the audiobooks in question did play when I tried them on my MacBook and a Panasonic stereo shelf-system.

Yesterday, I placed a Ticket request at jWin's Customer Service webpage, explaining the situation. They responded this morning, saying: "Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the compatibility of the JXCD573 with all MP3-CD's that are out there as some may be made differently. Please try using the brands which are compatible for future reference." Great advice, I would have never thought of that. Of course, I will probably bring quite a few audiobooks home in the future and then wait to see if the publisher has used a format compatible with jWin.

Otherwise, the unit appears to perform its other functions well, considering its price. (I've only had the unit a few days.) I will, however, second the complaints of those who find the LCD display very hard to read and who worry that the function selection switch seems far too fragile to last very long.

I bought this boombox for my Dad--he loves it! It's easy to use and it plays CDs, MP3 CDs, cassette tapes, and MP3's from SD cards AND Flash/USB drives, and an AUX input lets me plug any MP3 player in as well. Reading from SD/USB is fast, and sound quality from any/all input is pretty good!

My only complaint is that on an MP3 CD, SD card or USB drive, where you have hundreds of MP3s sorted into folders, there is no way to skip between folders. For example, if you have 20 folders on your card/drive and you want folder 17, you have to manually skip through every song from folders 1 to 16.

There is a feature that lets you skip 10 tracks at a time... However, this doesn't work very well, and it confuses the crap out of Dad. If you have 12 tracks in a folder and hit the button once, you go to track 10. Hit it again and you go to track 2 in the same folder. It'd be much more useful if you could navigate between folders instead of (sort of) skipping 10 tracks at a time.

To sum it up: Great product, especially for the price! With all the media/input options, the lack of folder skipping feature definitely wasn't a make or break thing for me.