Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Arrived today, packed well, no issues there. Initial impressions: essentially garbage The thing has an AM/FM radio which is unnecessary and a useless feature in 2021. No one in their right mind wants to order one of these to use as a radio. Save 25 cents and don't bother adding this legacy feature. The only reason I wanted the Arsvita cassette device was to transfer some 1990s audio 'letters' my late father sent me when I lived overseas while serving in the Navy. I popped a tape in and listened for a few minutes to make sure the tape was playing and to verify the functionality of the unit. The audio playback through the tape player is okay. These are old tapes but I have an old cassette player and can compare the audio output so at least this feature works as desired. The tapes play fine but even at max audio, the volume is quite low. I found an unused micro SD card, popped it in, and began recording from the tape. I stopped the tape after 5 minutes to see how it sounded. Short story: It is bad. There is audio being captured but it's in and out. I'll hear a couple of words then dead air then a few more words and then dead air again. This just continues. I found (went out and bought) another card, brand new, popped it in, and recorded on it for 5 minutes. This time, I couldn't get any playback from the SD card in the Arsvita device itself. Fortunately, putting both cards into an SD card reader on my PC and I can listen to audio on both of them. so it is transferring audio, it just doesn't seem to want to play back properly on the Arsvita itself. This is a major disappointment. The audio quality is sub-par at best. It is significantly worse than the audio that I can hear on the tape. All in all, not worth $44.99. I will be seeking a refund through Amazon. Edit: something else that is annoying and shows the 'cheapness' of this device... it doesn't have any auto--stop features... for instance, if you press the Fast Forward or Reverse (rewind) buttons, it will reach the end of the tape but the button doesn't pop-up. You have to manually hit stop. If you walk away for a few minutes, it just keeps trying to FF or Rewind and eventually starts making a horrible noise. Edit #2: I've been offered $10 to take down this review.