Review on Rechargeable CD Player with Bluetooth, MONODEAL - Portable CD Player with Built-in Speakers, Perfect for Car and Home Use (Remote Control, Dust Cover Included) by David Cash

Admittedly, I'm one of those users who only read the manual as a last resort. So after unpacking I first looked for the power button on either the player or the remote control but couldn't find anything! Read the instructions, fool! Pretty smart, pull the charging cable to turn the device on/off (although the manual says "press the cable"). Excellent, the display lights up and the remote control buttons do their job. The next step was to connect to my Smart TV's HDMI port. There is no HDMI cable included, just an AV cable that will probably never be used, but I have a stash of extra HDMI connectors. I put in the DVD with the movie "Call of the Wild" and here we go. Excellent video and audio quality as expected with HDMI, and it's easy to jump from chapter to chapter with the remote control. An audio oddity: while the built-in speakers sound pretty good, they can't be turned off when using the TV's speakers. Pressing the mute button or setting the volume to zero will mute the HDMI port. The best approach seemed to be to set the volume on the player to its lowest setting of "1". In the next step, different formats and media were tried out. The DVD drive had no trouble with a standard movie DVD, a standard audio CD, or my homemade MP3 CD collection. But the USB port is a different story. Through trial and error I found that it can boot flash drives formatted as FAT3 but not NTFS. It played the MP3 collection with no problems but choked on MP4 movies. My large movie collection consists of MP4s, but I downloaded one movie in AVI format, burned it to DVD and copied it to a flash drive. It played perfectly on both media. In the AVI format, four films must be stored on a DVD. I haven't tested the HCD-10's Bluetooth capabilities yet, but might later. The documentation asks for more details on valid formats. It would also be useful to update the firmware to add MP4 and the ability to mute the internal speakers while keeping HDMI audio active. My thought was to use the HCD-10 for travel. Almost all motels/hotels now have flat screen TVs with HDMI inputs, many of which are available to guests in the room. Wall mount installation is obvious, but I had to go back to the desktop stand manual. The photo in the "Accessories" section was helpful. Nice non-slip design.