These are the features I want:

CD player that supports MP3
USB to read additional MP3s
Aux input
radio
casette is a plus but not required
support for full directory navigation and file name display(none of that playing mp3s only as a track)

From my research on the web this German Grundig player looks the best:

Beezz RCD 6800 DEC

One of the best features is the German case design, the top CD lift panel also hides away the USB port, better protecting any USB stick. Also the LCD is rather big and backlit, it looks like it supports directories from all the buttons and the LCD size.

CD-player with CD-R/RW read capability in CD-DA, MP3 and WMA format
Additionally equipped with USB port and SD/MMC slot
It may be hard to buy a player from Germany though. Amazon.de has it..

Another contender:
jWIN Electronics JX-CD561D Portable MP3 CD Boombox with USB / SD / MMC reader

Jwin Product Page
It is listed at J&R.com for a list price of $65 but marked down to $50. I cannot determine if this player supports full directory navigation and file name display though.

Can anyone find anything better?

I am getting really pissed off at these manufacturers. There are so many companies making hard drive or flash based portable mp3 players, but what about all the other niches like an MP3/USB/SD boombox?

I found this Mexican manufacturer I never heard of called UniREX that has a huge product line of boomboxes many of them with CD Mp3 and USB, but I cannot find a single e-retailer or review of them. Some of the UniREX boomboxes even say they support DIVX and VCD.

At a brick Bestbuy store I tested out the Philips AZ1836:



It only allowed you to navigate mp3 files using track numbers which is ruinous in my opinion. If I want to find a specific song on a mp3 CD with over 10 albums I do not want to navigate by + or - a track number. Also while I was there at bestbuy my brother tested my USB drive in another boombox player that is meant for an Ipod or satelitte radio device(I cannot remember the model) and he broke the USB stick. He torqued the display unit to look at something in the back and the usb slot is at the bottom of the unit and it broke the plastic casing. The usb drive still works, it is taped up and not pretty though. This highers my estimation of the Gruding design.

I just noticed that Amazon.de has listed two units on apparently with a radio recorder(usb or SD I assume) one without:
Grundig Beezz RCD 6800 DEC/A Tragbares Radio mit CD-Player schwarz EUR 76,99
Grundig RRCD 6800 DEC CD-Radio-Rekorder schwarz EUR 83,95

From a Froogle.de search you can find alot more e-retailers that carry this product. Neckermann.de lists the most product info:

... "Anzeige: Titelnummer, Titelname, ID3-Tag, Bitrate, Wiedergabemodi" ...

I machine translated it: "Indicate title number, title name, to ID3-Tag, bit rate, rendition modes" Does it say specifically it can navigate folders/files and display file names and ID3 tags? A track based navigation is a real turn off to any mp3 player.

Also will a radio tuner from the European market like the one in this Grundig work in the USA?

If you like to read the manual, it should be available >here<.



IIRC in the US you have a voltage of 110V, while European devices usually work with 220V...

I could not view that manual page. "500 Internal Server Error"; I even backtracked and it still did not work. I had to register to view the service section and it still would not let me through. If you can download it, would you mine putting it on a free upload service like: http://www.mytempdir.com/

As for the voltage issues, there are convertors/adaptors for such things. My grandma insists on buying appliances in the USA and lugging them to Greece where she lives for half the year and she has no trouble to use them with convertors.

You've got a message...

If that's no hassle, then it's OK. I thought i'd better mention it...

The pre-emphasis on FM broadcasts in Europe is less than in the USA. Hence the European in-radio de-emphasis will leave more high frequency content in USA stations than there should be. It's fine really - it sounds just like turning the treble up a bit. This probably improves things on a cheap radio!

The spacing on AM bands in the USA allows stations every 10kHz, while in Europe it's every 9kHz. If the radio only tunes in 9kHz steps (that's normal for digital radios over here), you won't be able to tune into most AM broadcasts in the USA properly.


There was a very cheap (£20, $40) boombox in our local Tesco (supermarket) recently with a USB socket. It wouldn't work at all with my cheap mp3 player / USB stick. It sold out quickly and they haven't restocked.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
David.

Yerma was kind enough to send me a mytempdir link of the Grundig Beezz RCD 6800 DEC manual in English:
http://www.mytempdir.com/1275814

If anyone else is interested in this same product it is better to read through the manual than scan through the poor info available from e-commerce sites. The manual says you can navigate and choose albums for MP3 which is what I wanted to know. It takes 6 C size batteries. I thought an AC step up convertor would be no problem, but it is. At radioshack I checked out a convertor that converts from 230 volt to 110 volts and it was more expensive, bigger and bulkier than I thought. It was something like $40+ US dollars but Radioshack is usually pricy. Anyway at the worst I can buy 12 rechargeable C batteries have one set in the boombox at all times, the other six outside and charged.

2Bdecided, thanks for the info on radio frequencies in Europe. The manual says that this boombox supports from FM 87.5-108 MHz. AM I really do not care for since in the USA it only has mostly talk radio which I have zero interest for.

I found a Greek e-commerce site that has the Beezz listed: http://www.technixx.gr/detail.jsp?gruppe=1...p;deeplink=true which is good for me since I have zero knowledge of German, but a reading ability in Greek and some speaking knowledge. But the VAT tax is 19% from technixx.gr anyway it is too late to call them but hopefully I can call them in Greece soon and ask if you have to pay Greek VAT if you live in the USA and how much shipping would be. Does any German know some powerful German e-commerce sites with electronic goods that are available in English language or how to deal with Amazon.de in English, and how much German VAT is(and if you have to pay that VAT from USA)?

I ordered the Grundig Beezz RCD 6800 DEC from a German e-commerce site ( http://www.computeruniverse.net/ ) and have been using it for some months now.

Unfortunately, it has no support for true directory navigation, thus it is very annoying and not exactly what I wanted. You have to navigate folders and songs based on numbers, but when an individual song plays it will display the playlist info with Song Title, Track, Album, etc. As a result you when you enter a USB stick, SD card or CD full of MP3s, it has to read through the whole directory structure and create a sort of table before you can listening to anything and this takes awhile with USB sticks especially, with SD card the process is fast, and with a CD the process is middling(in terms of speed). Being forced to navigate based on vague numbers is a huge turn off for me, but I still use it regularly.

It seems that there are so many companies making a glutton of portable hard-drive and flashed based MP3 players while the mp3 boombox market is totally neglected and sucks badly.

Its not so much a market issue, when you can go out and sort of 'do it yourself'. An old radio from the 80s with a line-in and connect a portable mp3 player with said navigational abilities will nearly give you what you're suggesting manufacturers build. I mean yeah, you will have wires, but you will have what you want. I use old radios connected to mp3 players or computers. Can't beat the sound quality from a time when boomboxes sounded good.

Thanks for posting your experiences.

I bought the JVC RCEZ38, it sucks, see my review at amazon.

The J-Win mentioned above in this thread is available at overstock.com, here are some reviews. summary: no UI complaints, but no bass, tiny size.

I just found the Lasonic i931 which based on some reviews i find online does have usb & sd card connectors. It's a bit pricey ($135-150 at the stores i looked at).

Re: using an old boombox with a line-in, i tried to do that with an old JVC I have. The headphone level out from my sandisk sansa was so low i had to crank the volume on both to get listenable sound.

I ended up buying a $5 cassette line in adapter; works a lot better.

Dan Pritts, I read your review.

To compare it to the Grundig:
The Grundig does support resume, but it only resumes the whole track, it will not resume say at the 2:30 min. mark of a song if you left off there. You have to press a resume button to activate the resume feature and when you switch sources: USB/SD Card/CD you have to remember to hit resume again for the new source or it will not resume your track. The sound quality is good and it is fairly loud, you can easily fill up a room or the adjoining rooms with noise. The FM tuner works good, but unless you use presets it is annoying to use because it goes in very small decimal increments(maybe this is because it is European unit). Mostly I use it off A/C power with a Seven Star SS202 travel convertor to convert from the 110V of my outlets to the 230V that the unit expects. It also takes 6 C batteries, but I had trouble finding a rechargeable unit that will charge 6 C batteries at one time. It does not have AUX input but it does a have USB connector port in the back, which I have not used and I am unsure if it charges the device plugged in. The biggest drawback like I said is that it navigates based on assigning numbers to the folders and also displaying how many tracks are in each folder. Once I put a new album on SD card and I had trouble navigating to it, so using my PC I found out that the album had 10 tracks and went back to the Grunding and saw which directory number had 10 tracks. One plus is that is a remote control, a slim one that takes some type of watch battery.

The Lasonic i931 is too big in my opinion. The Safa Boom-1000 from Korea(1GB onboard memory, supports SD card) looks like an interesting solution, but I have no idea how to import it or it if supports true file based navigation with characters, instead of track navigation(assigning numbers). Using a portable MP3 player and AUX in, is not a very ideal solution to me, but unfortunately there are few decent MP3 boomboxes that have SD or USB.

In Australia MP3 with USB boomboxes are quite popular-I found and bought a Phlips AZ1816-has USB and MP3, and plays music from a connected USB device using controls on the front.

Cost me $88.

Even will play non-DRM tracks on a iPod-which is neat.