Full Review

I bought my SP250 about 7-8 months ago and haven't regretted it. It's a solid piece of equipment with quite a few features.

I initially bought the SP250 because I had a cd player, but wanted more than 80 min of music per cd. I decided to get an mp3 cd player because I hate carrying around extra cd's, but i wanted a lot of music with me. There weren't too many mp3 cd players available at the time, so I decided on the SP250 after reading reviews and examining the features.

The fact that it is rechargable was a big selling point for me. I disliked my old cd player because it ate through batteries like there was no tomorrow. I currently listen to my player for roughly 45 min a day, 5 days a week and i usually need to recharge the batteries once a week. That only comes out to 225 min per charge. Admittedly, my batteries are pretty old now, so they probably don't hold as much charge as they used to. Another issue with the recharging is that when I do decide to charge it, I have to plug in the adapter, turn it on, let it warm up, stop it, wait for it to turn off, then select charge battery from the menu that pops up. This process is quite annoying and takes a few min. Not something i like waiting around for.

The anti-skip on this machine is great. The player reads ahead and buffers most of the song into its internal memory and the cd often stops spinning a min or 2 into the song. After that, the music is skip free. I'm not sure if i'm imagining this, but it seems that the amount of skipping is inversely proportional to the amount of charge held in the battery. When the battery level is low, it seems to skip more often than when i have a full charge. Other than that, its great and skip free.

The startup process for this unit is one of the issues i dislike with the SP250. It takes around a min or so to read the cd and start playing the music. This too seems to vary inversely with the battery charge. Although it isn't a big issue, I like my music to start when I want it, not a min or so later. I also dislike the amount of time needed for the machine to shut down. It generally takes another minute (you can set this time in the machine, but 1 min is the minimum value) to completely turn off. This doesnt really affect anything except when i need to recharge the batteries. I have to let the machine shut off completely before the option to recharge shows up.

So far I haven't had any problems with the player reading different types of cd's. I haven't tried overburned cd's yet, but so far the unit reads every cd i've put into it. It also scrolls the song name and title read from the id3 tag, which I thought to be an important feature. The SP250 also supports playlists. I've been able to create playlists using winamp and port them right over to the SP250.

This machine is packed with features. You can pretty much customize everything you need to, such as equalizer levels, sound levels, amount of anti-skip, etc. The menus are easy to use and understand and navigation is simple. The SP250 also comes with many accessories. I love the fact that it was bundled with 2 types of headphones for people with different tastes. The case was designed well and i've had no problems with it whatsoever.