Unfortunately, there are so few choices today for portable CD players that I bought one of these in spite of the terrible reviews. Quality control and poor design are legitimate problems here, I can confirm.I bought this as a gift and was testing it out beforehand, because of the bad reviews. Sure enough, my model had a problem where it would not detect that the lid was closed. If I squeezed the unit a certain way as I was closing the lid, I could get it to work sometimes. Pathetic. It's pretty bad when you know the thing isn't going to work before you even open the package. It was just a matter of finding out what the specific problem would be, and I found out immediately.There probably are some working units out there but who has the time or inclination to keep buying and returning them until you get a good one? Spare yourself the trouble.