Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Although the concept is an intriguing and potentially enlightening one for an infant/toddler, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. As a musician and engineer, I acquire and test out many toys claiming to enrich a child's musical tastes/abilities, etc. As a musician, the sound this cube produces is so terrible, I shudder every time I hear it. When I first heard it, I immediately thought the batteries were dead and changed them, only to discover that brand new batteries made no difference whatsoever. My 11 month old son pressed the buttons eagerly to see what would happen, frowned, and then quickly pressed them again to make it stop and pointed at the CD player from which there is almost always some sort of music playing! He by far prefers a CD or even an MP3, so this toy has now been abandoned. The distinction between the different instruments is very slight. My violin sounds nothing like this supposed violin sound. The rest of the instruments do not resemble their real counterparts very much either, and even the intonation is not exact. As an engineer, I know that even the simplest synthesizers and even the most terrible audio compression algorithms produce better audio quality. Why couldn't the engineers of this toy make this sound better? If anything, I would think the audio auality of this toy would put a musically oriented child off of music entirely. For this price you can buy a better electronic keyboard and play with truly different sounds with your little one. As for selection, aside from a few obvious ones that are acceptable, there are numerous more interesting and more familiar pieces composed by Mozart. I'd love to know who chose these pieces and why. So far, this toy has mostly been thrown around. As such, it has not yet broken, though I too have experienced the need to turn it off and on again in order to get it to function "properly" again. So, I would wait for a new version of this toy to come out with considerably better electronics before buying. Or, at the very least, listen to it at the store before you buy it to see if you can stomach the sound yourself.