Way back when, I posted something about my girlfriend who needed a new car stereo (her factory CD player was flaking out), but she had zero interest in an Empeg (too much money, no decent computer for ripping, etc.). So, I ended up talking her into getting a Jensen MP3510 (currently $200 at Crutchfield). It's a fairly basic CD player to which they bolted on support for MP3-CDs. It was the cheapest MP3-CD player out there.

Well, after having swapped cars with her for a while (my car only seats two and I needed more) and playing with it, I can give a basic review.

- The electronics suck. On some CDs, it plays like you'd expect. On others, the front speakers cut out entirely and the back speakers have no bass. It's repeatable! On top of this repeatable issue, the same flaw also surfaces intermittently with any source material (radio, normal CD, or MP3 CD). I don't know if it's a flaky install, flaky overheating electronics, or flaky software.

- The MP3 business is strange. I burned a CD with 12 albums worth of MP3 files, one per subdirectory. The first one showed up as "disc 2" as if it were in a CD changer or something. For about half of the files, it showed the ID3v1 title, for the others, it showed the filename. I have no idea why it could read the tags from some files and not others. (My Empeg, of course, has no such problems.)

- Worse yet, in MP3 mode, all of the other stereo features go away. Random play? Gone. Disc skip (as in a changer)? Gone. The radio preset buttons at the bottom, which for a normal CD turn into function buttons, turn into seek buttons. You can punch in an absolute track number.

In summary, if this is supposed to be the killer car stereo of the future, we've got some sadly deluded marketing people out there. Anybody else have experience with these things? Wow am I glad to have an Empeg instead.