any other working 350's out there?

[dewdude]

i've owned my 350 for almost 3 years now and it still works and sounds great, i'll never give it up. I'm reading about a lot of people with dead 350's and am wondering...does anyone else have a 350 that still performs like new? i mean, mine has this WMA bug where it'll play a disc of all WMA once then give no disc errors forever...but..i've dropped it, slammed the remote in the car door and have to tape the battery holder shut..but i just took it on an 8 hour car trip and had good clear music the whole way. i had a funky problem with the remote display going out but some WD-40 fixed that right up (sprayed the contacts and plugged it in a few times).

just wondering.

[Teknomancer]

I've owned an iMp400 discman for almost 3 years and it's absolutely flawless... Perfect working condition. The only problem I had with it, was it's battery needed to be chaged 2 times. But that's only minor considering the quality of the player.

By far THE best discman I've seen. It's so good it even competes with the discmans released this year.

[dewdude]

well, my batteries went dead (i hope) last night cuz the player just..shut off twice and upon rebooting...said NO DISC at the bottom and 004 for the track number. swapped discs and it worked fine..then cut off and upon the loading screen it just, shuts down

they've been in there for almost 25 hours of use..i imagiene they are exhausted.

[echidna3]

my imp350 fucked up 2 years ago. it suddenly decided it didnt want to read cds. the support in australia is non-existant. the repair company i sent it to (in australia) couldnt fix it at all, so they sold me a 550 for about AUD$250 (about 65% of the full price). it broke about 2 weeks ago, and wont even turn on. needless to say i am never buying an iriver again. they are shit. they are badly made, and the support sucks

[vinnie97]

My iMP-350 is 3+ years old and is still rocking...lucky me!

[Jasman]

My 350 is a replacement of the one I originally bought from a BestBuy years ago. It's 2 or so years old now, I think, maybe 3. My main problem with it is that it's never been good with skip protection. It's just too fussy. I'm thinking about buying an H1xx used or new and ditching the CD format altogether.

[Terkel Says]

I bought the imp-350 right when it came out. I had a few other cheap players, and I was sick of the poor quality. MP3's were jsut starting to take off, and I loved the idea of a radio and remote control. It served me faithfully up until college when the majority of my music was no longer on CDs. I saw this thread and realized my 350 is buried back home in my big ass box of outdated electronics. I would probably still rather use the 350 than any other portable cd player out there, but I just dont have the need anymore. The H120 is my new audio companion of choice, and with Rockbox it is the best thing out there right now for me. Good luck those of you still using the iRiver cd players. Im curious now to see if mine still works. Maybe I'll fire the old boy back up...

[U10]

I bought mine a few years ago and then put it aside for awhile. Recently I decided to revive it, was happy to discover firmware 2.80 (w/ .ogg). Had problem with recharging (now fixed it appears). Except for one other problem -- rebooting after playing .ogg tracks on a particular 240 track .ogg disc -- it works flawlessly (mp3 is fine, so far).

Revisiting this player has been a pleasant surprise and reminds me of what was great about portable sound:

1. Strong audio output
2. Solid bass (in part because of #1)
3. Excellent FM radio section
4. Excellent sound

Paul

[hijakk]

Mine died - I'm looking for a new one, or a 550, or a 900...

[sweetspot]

I also bought mine (350) when it first came out. The only thing which is wrong, is that the batteries finally gave out. It still works a charm with the mains plugged in, and honestly, I've never had one problem with it in regards to skipping or playing any cd. It's a great CD player, which if I ever bought batteries for, would use again.

[adam917]

I never owned an iMP-350, '400, or '450, so I don't know how them units are.

My iMP-550 is over two years old and runs fine, though I been using the iMP-900 since 2006-02-02 and when I used the iMP-550 throughout 2005, the remote I used was the iMP-900's remote (feels better).

I feel the '550 was a better unit than the iMP-900, though. It has a bigger anti-shock buffer and an optical out (if it works!).

The only negatives about the '550 seemed to be its 2-AA weirdly-shaped battery adapter, as well as the small headphone output (only 12 mW/channel, compared to the iMP-900's 18 mW/channel).

PS: My iMP-150's still kicking and is over 3 years old...

[J-Rock79]

I own a 350 that's about three years old. I got it for cheap $60 at a small shop in downtown Wilmington. I used it constantly until I got my H120 20GB last night. It's scratched to high heaven, but it still works. From the remote to the charger. When I first got it, I was suprised to find out it was basically the RioVolt SP250 in a slimmer package. Only difference was the RioVolt had a Bass Boost option on the FM Radio. Only thing that broke throughout its life the AA Battery adapter. Thankfully they are easily to replace.

[metastable]

My 350 is still going strong. I'm using a H320 now, but my wife still uses the 350 to play CDs at home. The iMP series were definetly some of the best CD players.

[iamkwan]

my 4 years imp350 is still working. but the batteries can use with full charged only 1 hour. and the remote's jog buttons are errors so i use the remote to be the ext. wire only.

[BMboomer]

Hi
I,m new to this forum, and have relly joined to see if anyone has any ideas about my IMP-100 (in Riovolt disguise) which has just started playing up after at least 6or7 years of faultless and regular service.
It was fine up until last weekend when it started getting stuck on "loading Ver 2.21" and can't ever seem to get past that. I tried newly recharged batteries, and tried updating to ver 2.5, but it can't even do that, because it has to get past loading the current version first.
I thought about upgrading to an IMP-450, but I can't seem to find anybody selling them any more.
I'd still like to get the Riovolt working again really.
Anyone got any ideas?

[MigL]

Hi everybody !

I've got my 350 since it appeared, and I've had no problems with, except for:

* The batteries, that I had to change once
* Remote, that sometimes misfunction when pressing some botton.

But I'm very pleased cause it still works as 1st day, and with many music formats that today's players don't have.

Pleased to meet you all !!

Bye,

MigL

[vortex-5]

I've had mine for 4 years now, no problems still ticking strong. The batteries seemed to have lost a little capacity but I was able to find new batteries for $6 per gumstick.

[WSikorski]

3+ years and still going strong. Replaced the batteries last year.

[snapdragon]

hi theis is my second imp-350 i bought one at best buy back when mp3 dics players first came out the day i got it i made a random mp3 disc of my musicwent to radio shack bought 149 dollar sony mp3 player wouldn't play my disc returned it went to best but and i say a dc player that the battery's last 23hrs so i figured i would get that

before i left i wanted to try out the player perfact play back all tracks remote a dream artist album and track displayed

after having it 2 years i plugged a universal charger into it didn't notice that the charger was set to 7 volts smoke appeared and my player still played only now the internal batterys wouldn't hold a charge

a year ago i found a player on ebay player only no batterys remote bag or battery case they did however send me the orignal headphones

through firmware i now have a password new display and 3 more eq options no outher cd player (outher than iriver) has these options


recently i got a h320 refurbished through iriver america and a imp-900 remote through ebay

i'm dreading givin up my 350 hands down one of the best disc player ever for the h320 however i now have a line in so i can still use the player to transfer audio music into mp3's

[agentjfong]

Bought my SlimX 350 new from Amazon.com in February of 2003. When I first got it, I had a bad AC Charger, which iRiver replaced promptly. After that, I used it moderately a few times a week, and for a few roadtrips.

Last summer I fell off a (kick) scooter and landed square on my backpack, where the SlimX was in the outside compartment, in the fleece bag. The metal cover warped from the impact, but the only problem was that the warping caused the cover to not quite hit the button that tells the device that the case is closed, but I did a quick mod, and it has been running fine since then.

Very good mp3 player for the amount I spent ($60 after rebates and price adjustments). I still see new ones going for around that much today. I got some portable speakers this week (Monster iSpeaker and Cyber Acoustics CA-MP30, the latter is awesome!), so now I easily have music when I'm working and can't wear headphones.

[MRC01]

Originally Posted by dewdude

i've owned my 350 for almost 3 years now and it still works and sounds great, i'll never give it up.
...
does anyone else have a 350 that still performs like new?

I've had mine for over 2 years of daily use. Still going like new. Plays CD-R and CD-RW no problem, WAV or MP3 no problem.

BTW, the iMP-350 has excellent sonic performance too. I measured it using test CDs and Analysis software. Frequency response from 20 Hz to 20 kHz is +/- 1 dB. That's better than any portable I've seen and better than some full size players.

[alfmeister]

My IMP350 is still working great. I wrote my review in January of 2002.
http://www.geocities.com/alfmeister13/

[MRC01]

Here's a graph comparing the iMP 350 with the T30 and a top quality full size CD player (Rotel RCD-1070). It doesn't look flat because I've expanded the Y axis units to exaggerate the curves. But the iMP 350 is pretty good, staying within 1.5 dB of flat throughout the range.

This is measured with all EQs turned off (Normal mode).