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  | JVC FS-B70 Executive Microsystem (Dark Wood)
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Average user rating:  | |
 Quality sound but then there's that CD changer... | |
| I bought this unit for my "smokers lounge" about 14 months ago. I have a heated garage where I puff on the occaisional cigar, sip some eau-de-vie and listen to my music. For quite some time I was extremely pleased with this little unit. It held its own.
About 9 months ago the 5 disc CD changer started skipping...not much at first and only on discs 4 and 5. Slowly things got worse until it became unuseable. I plugged an old Teac single disc player into the Auxilary input and it works fine. I did not want to hassle with a return or the dreaded warranty work. I agree with some of the other reviewers: the remote is anything but intuitive (but it works...in most cases, well) and the tape player will eat your tapes if you are not gentle and let the autoload feature take it from you. Bottom line: It sounds great, it has many nice features, it has very good speakers but the CD player (at least in mine) is junk. | |
 For the money, the sound quality exceeds expections | |
| Fresh out of the box, the treble is on the brighter side of neutral, with Norah Jones's sibilance coming across a tad harshly. Still, the brightness is acceptable, and I believe the speakers will mellow as they are run in. And despite the small enclosures, the bass response is usually ample without being muddy. It is easy, however, to boost the bass beyond what the packaged speakers can handle gracefully. Radiohead's Amnesiac sounds particularly clean and well-balanced on this system. Mos Def & Talib Kweli's Black Star sounds decent for the most part, but some tracks beg for a system that can really push some air mass, eg. Definition. All in all, for the money, this system performs admirably. | |
| Good system for reasonable price | |
| I bought this system for my bedroom about a year ago with a couple of requirements. I was looking for a compact system for under $200 with good sound, CD changer, tape deck, remote, and sleep timer so I could listen to music before I went to sleep.
I compared a number of different models within the same price range and feature range. I looked at a Sony that sounded great and looked good, but it had a slot CD system that didn't let you change CDs while it was playing. I looked at a Panasonic, but it didn't sound as good as the Sony. I looked at a Sharp, but it looked cheep and didn't sound as good as the Sony. I ended up going with the JVC FS-B70 from Crutchfield. The FS-B70 looks good (especially the speakers), has great sound, and all of the features I wanted including being able to swap CDs while it's playing. I do have a few minor gripes about it though. 1) Since I use this in my bedroom I wanted something I could use at night to help fall asleep. The display has three different levels of brightness. Unfortunately when you turn it on it always comes on at the highest brightness and even at the lowest setting it lights up my entire room. I end up putting a CD case in front of it to block out the light. 2) The remote is fairly straight forward to use when you can see the remote. Unfortunately all of the buttons are about the same size and shape so in the dark it's difficult to figure out which button to press. On several occasions I've accidentally turned on the alarm when I wanted to turn on the sleep timer. 3) The included wire antenna gets decent reception, but if you want to attached a better antenna the unit doesn't use a standard F plug. After a lot of hunting around I finally discovered that the connector is a PAL Coax. The adapter you need is available at Radio Shack as part number 278-265B. It would have been nice if this was mentioned in the manual, JVC's web site, or Crutchfield's web site. When I asked Crutchfield they pointed me to a $60 antenna when all I really wanted was something cheep that would work better than the included wire. 4) The CD changing mechanism is noisy. It's loud enough that it's woken me up if the CD changes before the sleep timer turns it off. Overall I'm happy with it, but it isn't exactly what I wanted for my bedroom. |
