Sony D-NF400 Psyc ATRAC Portable CD Player with AM / FM / TV / Weather Digital Tuner

Rating:
Summary: A lot of functionality in a neat package!
Review: Here we are, in this progressive era of the iPod. Those little white pillboxes that keep the audiophiles and the fashionistas happy. Technology that has advanced the most important underlying requirements to designing a portable music player: "Design" and "Features". We all want it to work great and look pretty at the same time, but what about the cost?
If you can't part with the money just yet for a new iPod, or you are like me, wary of having to interface with your computer for listening to all your music, the Sony Psyc D-NF400 Portable CD player might be the best alternative. There are so many features that come with this Discman! The basics are what you would expect; it plays all my discs, including CD-R/RW & MP3s, it has AM/FM radio that has better than fair reception, and it has a very good anti-skipping "G-Protection" system that doesn't drain the 2 AA batteries. The additional features are really useful as well, you can access audio from local TV at the push of a button, and get the local weather band as well. For the occasional CDs with ID3 tags, the Discman will recognize the artist and name of the track and display it. The most important thing is that the Discman is reliable. It never has noticeably skipped, interestingly I found that it plays most of my scratched CDs clearly when other home stereo equipment did not (maybe it's a new CD player lens thing...), it can run on the same fresh batteries for an astonishingly long 85 hours.
One of the better add-ons is the Atrac3plus file playback feature. When I first bought this CD Discman home, I really wasn't interested in the enclosed software regarding Sony's file compression technology. However, this tool provides this Discman package with a measured amount of what the iPod boasts, namely substantial music file storage. The D-NF400 is built to work seamlessly with this technology. I think that this tool would be the best for the listener who wants to be able to enjoy their original CD pressings and their downloaded music files, without having to go through the tedious task of putting their entire CD collection on their computer.
Finally, the "Design" aspects. The unit is just a few centimeters larger in diameter than your CDs. It is not bulky at all, in fact I would consider the smooth exterior to be streamlined. It has a minimum amount of buttons, which makes it look clean, but may give you a little grief in figuring out how to work the menus for sound quality and such. It fits in my coat pocket snugly and has a secure release button that will prevent the Discman from opening accidentally. The only design flaw is the ugly hairband-looking headphones it comes with, other than that the D-NF400 is comprehensively modern in form and function.


Rating:
Summary: Great player but few irritating problems
Review: I got this player just yesterday (Nov 15th, 2004) after checking one that a friend had. I wanted one with a tuner and there were very few in the market. I trusted SONY, so brought this model.
It is a great player and does what all other reviewers before me have written.
But my first problem is with the so called CDCASE4 model CD Player Case that is supposedly designed for D-NF400. Even though it is designed for this model, the player fits with great great difficulty. And after it fits in, it has no opening for you to use the CD Player control buttons, but an opening for the LCD display, now what good is that !! This model does not come with a remote, so they should have thought about that. Do they expect someone to load the CD and just keep listening like a radio and not be able to forward thru the CD.

Second is a wierd problem. After looking at the player for some time, I noticed that the text display in the LCD was not horizontal. It was tilted a bit downwards at the right end of the sentence !! It bugged me so much that I decided to look at my friends model, to make sure mine was not a defective piece.
And lo behold, in his piece the text that was shown was tilted down from the left (or beginning of the line) end of the sentence.
I am wondering how no one ever reported this. My friend brought the player a month before me, so surely they couldn't be from the same lot to have the same problem. The player works fine, but it just bugs me that I shelled down the price for a brand new player and what I got was not upto Sony's brand name.

I am not sure if I return it to Amazon and get another piece, it will not have the same problem. I could not find any user groups for this player to find out if others have found this problem.

The picture of the player on both Amazon's site and Sony's site is not the exact way the player looks. The picture has a little pearl shaped white button below the LCD display which controls the Radio and Radio bands. But in the piece I got, it is not a pearl shaped button, but rather a 3 cm long horizontal button.

Finally, I got confused between two models with the same model number. Only difference was that one was Psyc and other was not. The Psyc one was $7 more. From the picture it looked to me like the Psyc model had a larger LCD display and I thought the green background of the LCD should be easier to view than the blue background that comes with the non-Psyc model.

Rating:
Summary: Finally
Review: I have went through countless portable cd players and 2 mp3 players. I had the same problem as most do with the mp3 player, it used batteries, faster then I could buy them. The Atrac technology included with this unit is useful but I haven't tried to drop the rate to 48kbps yet. I'm not for sure if I will. I am getting 100 or so songs on a cd without any problem at a higher kbps rate. The tuner is great. All of the stations I listen to and more come in very clear. I found myself listening to a golf match on the tv band, for some reason, I kept listening. One of my biggest problems with portable cd players is the cheap headphones that come with them. I can honestly say that the ones included with this unit are not the best BUT I use them and have no intentions of replacing them. There is plenty of bass, goes loud enough and they are comfortable. Another issue is durability. I had a Panasonic that I was carrying in a backpack when I laid the backpack down, ok maybe I didn't do it gently but nevertheless I didn't throw it down either, broke. Not completely but the part where the lens moves broke and would not work anymore. This unit has been dropped a few times but usually not real hard, it has been fell asleep on and it has yet to have any problems other then a slight scratch. The SonicStage software is eh, clunky but it works fine once you get used to it. I usually do not buy Sony products because I had tried a few of my friend's players out and wasn't impressed. I go to buy a new player and this player stood out with the promise of 490 songs on one cd. It's funny because I have yet to use that feature but everything and I mean everything else about this player is near perfect. It will not skip, unless you absolutely go out of your way to make it. Walking won't do it even if it is in your pocket. I also workout with it on, still no problems. The battery life is incredible at 75-100 hours on 2 AA batteries. If you can find a better player then you should buy it but take it from me, for the price, you don't get any better.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: I looked around a while for an CD player that didn't cost an obscene amount of money, yet has functions I would use. This one is just what I asked for, a simple to use and reliable MP3/CD player. It works great so far. The headphones are a bit cheap, but I have no plans to replace them.

Rating:
Summary: Great for OTR/audiobooks and music too
Review: I love this walkman! It sounds totally decent with low-bitrate non-music files and terrific with music. (And I like the way it looks too.)

I shopped for a while for an mp3/cd player that allows you to fast-forward within mp3 tracks. It seems like an incredibly basic feature, but many devices can't do it (including the Panasonic I tried first). I was concerned about the Sony line because the manuals say that you can't fast-forward in mp3 tracks that are "packet-written" and I wasn't sure what that meant. But this device can fast forward in tracks on a data cd I burned on my computer and that's what I was concerned about. This device also resumes from where you turn it off, which is a great feature when you have hundreds of files on a disk. My (very old) RioVolt didn't have that feature and it was a huge drag.

All in all, the interface, features, and battery life are about all I could ask of a walkman. The radio and the TV band are very nice extras as well.

Rating:
Summary: Great for Audio Books
Review: I needed an mp3 player for listening to an mp3 CD made from an audio book. Therefore, the player had to be able to resume from the middle of an mp3 track, and it had to be able to fast-forward and rewind within a track. It also needed a built-in radio so I could listen to it while I'm at work.

After some research, I settled on this one. It had everything I was looking for, and it also is very frugal on batteries. Sony claims "more than 85 hours" of playback on two AA's. It caches some of the mp3 data to memory and only spins up the disc when the cache runs dry. So the designers definitely thought through a few things. [Edit: I've now had this for at least a month, using it for about an hour a day five days a week, and my first set of batteries is still only half depleted.]

One feature I wasn't expecting was the ability to play m3u play lists (if you put it into a special play mode--read the manual to figure out how). Unfortunately, as I learned through trial and error, the player only supports two playlists per mp3 CD. My best guess is that this is to try to make mp3's look less attractive than Sony's proprietary ATRAC format, which this player also supports. But anyway, the player also supports playing individual folders as "groups" and you can always use the hack of numbering the tracks as the player by default plays tracks in alphabetical order. And since the player reads ID3 tags, you don't have to worry about the number in the filename showing up on the display.

Another minor issue is that if you pause an mp3, the player will use that time to load more mp3 data from the disc, but during that time (about 2 seconds), the controls will be unresponsive. So you can't pause and then immediately resume an mp3--you have to pause, wait 2 seconds, then resume. (I notice this because I frequently pause my Pimsleur language CD to give me time to formulate the answer to a question.)

For anyone researching this player, the D-NE300 player is pretty much the same as this one, but without the built-in tuner.

While the D-NF400 isn't perfect, it seems to be the best player out there for my needs, at a reasonable price.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I oringinally bought an MP3 player, which was wonderful; however, the battery life was horrible. So, I decided to return it, and instead get a CD player. I saw this Sony CD player, and decided to buy it. Let me tell you, it was a great buy. The Atrac3 technology can hold up to 490 songs; which are easy to copy to CD. The CD player is light, never skips, and I have yet to change the batteries (in three weeks.) The sound is great, the Radio/TV/Weather reception is very good; specifically, the Radio is crystal clear. I was compelled to write a review for this prodcut; it is simply amazing!