Its been a while since I bought any new gadgets, but the logical step after buying my CD writer was to scout around for a good mp3 player. The obvious choices were either branded Sony and Aiwa Discmans which would’’ve set me back anywhere between 4 to 6 grand, or one of those cheap Chinese Fujitel pieces plastered all over Baazee.
Now, a 7 day replacement warranty is just not enough for me, paranoid freak that I am.I figured I wanted a decent discman for around 2.5 to 3 grand, with VCD capability, good sound quality and with some kind of substantial warranty and technical support. That’s when the Mitashi Player fell into my lap. I bought it off an obscure shop ’’Sony collection’’ in Irla, and the first thing I had to do was trudge back to return the non functional adapter. Its not a good way to start, but s hit happens. Anyway, I was impressed by the sound quality. Good, rich sound with nice bass response and pretty impressive clarity. Vcds play quite well, with acceptable picture quality. It plays audio CDs without any fuss, But Mp3 has given me quite a headache. An Mp3 CD burned at 52X nearly breaks my eardrums with skips and pops, which can be forgiven in a reasonably priced Chinese player. But skips and pops in the same CD written at 24x are unacceptable. I burned a CD at 8x which plays just about all right, but still not completely clean. The piece proclaims an 80 second antishock buffer which seems to work pretty well, but it almost stops functioning on low power conditions.
As far as power goes, 2 AA Duracell Plus batteries go on for about 3 -3.5 hours. Evereadys last about 30 minutes. Ni-Cd Rechargables work well too, lasting an hour after a 6 hour recharge. The strangest thing is that when the batteries almost completely run down, the drive sometimes reverses direction and spins like it wants to take off. Punching the stop button has absolutely no effect, and I have to wait until it wears itself out. The battery box is on the inside, under the spinning CD, so I cant even pull the plug on it.
I’ll have to give it a thumbs down on the interface. The buttons are sluggish on the response, and picking a song from the list is quite an ordeal. The only navigation buttons are Next, Previous and N/P, which skips to the next folder on the CD. The remote works all right though.
On the plus side, it’’s got good support. Tech support is a door to door service. They’ll pick up the piece from your place within 3 days and deliver it back repaired. Mitashi seems like a responsible company that plans to stay and grow. There have a lot of higher end products that seem promising. Check their website https://mitashi.com.
All in all, I’d say the product is pretty average. Given a little more moolah, I would definitely have gone for a better piece (perhaps one of Mitashi’s other models). But for the price and a one year warranty, I think this should do just fine.