Apex AD-3201 DVD Player
BIG problems with this machine
I am surprised how high a rating most people are giving this machine! I tried this machine for a few weeks and found that with most DVDs the movie would pause for several seconds about half way through. &quot;The Great Escape&quot; froze altogether and all I could do was hit eject, as almost every other button on the machine was no longer functioning once this happened. This movie did not act up at all on a friend's player, which was NOT an Apex, so it was obviously the machine that was faulty. I tried an exchange but the second machine made a horrible grinding sound when I put any disc in and every disc I tried skipped every few seconds or didn't play at all!<br />I also did not find the mp3 support on the ad-3201 very good. I was able to use data cdrs (another reviewer said it only was compatible with music cdrs), but they had to be 650mb (74 min) ones, and the songs seemed to often end up in a different order than the way I had burned them. With all discs the names were illegible - only eight characters would show...it would show a few letters of the first word, insert some underscore and a few letters of another word! There is no random play for mp3s either and if they are in a folder the song names and numbers won't show at all.<br />This machine handled music cds very well...some of my HDCDs sounded amazing. The machine only allows for 12 songs (or dvd positions) to be pre-programmed however, which is far too few for most uses. I found the sound quality in general to be one of the best things about this machine...it even has a built in equalizer (for music cds only) which is handy at times. Perhaps if all you wanted was to play audio cds this machine would be an okay investment. If you plan to purchase dvds, however, stay away.<br />The zoom feature was good, the remote so-so (the arrangement of the numbers is not the standard 123, 456, 789 so I was constantly hitting the wrong numbers if I didn't look closely) and the picture was quite good, but perhaps a bitdark.<br />I'm afraid that the freezing of dvds is just too big a problem to make up for all the good things about this unit. Other people on the company's web site say this is a problem with this model. Considering all the features and low price of this machine I would have given it at least four stars had it not been for this major flaw. Don't get stuck with this lemon unless Apex somehow fixes this problem in a future firmware upgrade.