Apex AD-3201 DVD Player
I guess I'm lucky - I love it!
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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.<br />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.