Sony D-NE300 Psyc ATRAC Portable CD Player, Gray

Rating:
Summary: Very good sound at bargain prices, however...
Review: The Sony D-NE 300 is a great and stylish CD player. Its sound is superb especially with the parametric equalizer, and various sound enhancing setting, off, rock, soft, etc. activated. The G shock protection is adequate even when riding a very bouncing school bus on rough pavemnet. It offers an opportunity to condense more than 100 songs into 1 CD for playback which I haven't tried out yet. However, the player, like many low end CD players are made in China. The 1st player I got had serious laser tracking problem causing excessive skipping problem. The replacement CD player had no problem whatsoever. Having to removing the CD in order to change batteries is one of the minor annoyances. A pretty good player at this bargain basement price range.

Rating:
Summary: Very good sound at bargain prices, however...
Review: The Sony D-NE 300 is a great CD player. Its sound is superb especially with the parametric equalizer, and various sound enhancing setting, off, rock, soft, etc. activated. The G shock protection is adequate even when riding a very bouncing school bus on rough pavemnet. It offers an opportunity to condense more than 100 songs into 1 CD for playback which one haven't tried out yet. However, the player, like many low end CD players are made in China. The 1st player I got had serious laser tracking problem causing excessive skipping problem. The replacement CD player had no problem whatsoever.

Rating:
Summary: This is soo great!
Review: This Cd player kicks but.The only thing any one can possibly find wrong with this product is that it misleads you as you still need CdR/RW software to create the Cd's.

Rating:
Summary: i wish my ChromeX hadn't broken...
Review: unfortunately for me, it did. since i had gotten it for $50 in a great Amazon deal a year or two back, i felt that i should be able to get something as good for $50 again. i was wrong, and i think i might try to get the ChromeX repaired now. i'll get straight to the main points:

the good:
* light
* attractive styling
* solid sound quality

the bad:
* loses all settings when the battery is changed. this is particularly annoying because of 2 default settings: 1) a loud beep for every button press, and 2) the default volume is ZERO.
* additionally, it will not remember if you were in the middle of a song after a battery change, so all their hype about the 'ranking' features and stuff is useless.
* scanning backwords & forwards is sloooooow. if you scan forward for 5 seconds, you will move forward in the song by all of ... 5 seconds. It accelerates a little the longer you hold, but holding for 30 seconds will only move you forward a minute or so. so if you're listening to a 20 minute book chapter and you accidentally skip to the next chapter, it'll take you about 5 minutes to scan to the middle of the previous chapter.
* the scrolling of the file info is also extremely slow. i think it's reasonable to look at the cd player and get all the file info within 5 seconds, but that's not the case here. it scrolls right to left, character by character and it takes approximately 1 second per character. you read that right - one second PER CHARACTER. it's not meant for people with normal brains.

that's it - nothing really good to report and some true annoyances. this is a poorly conceived product - they should have spent as much time on the user friendliness as they did on the sweet design.

Rating:
Summary: Great Product, Great Value!
Review: Waiting for pay-day, I spent 4 weeks researching to find the best MP3CD player for under $100 Canadian. After going through many players, looking for the best features-to-price ratio, it came down to two players. The Sony D-NE300, and the Panasonic SLCT710. I read many reviews for each player, looked at the pros and cons, and compared the players extensively. My ultimate decision ended up being the D-NE300, which I bought for $90 Canadian alongside Sony MDR-G54LP headphones for $30. Great combination, to say the least.

Notable features: MP3, Atrac3/Atrac3plus, Parametric EQ, G-Protection, CD Text, ID3v1/ID3v2 tags, AVLS, 18 playback modes including Auto-ranking, 85-hour battery life.

The main reason I wanted a MP3CD player was because I'm always on the run. I'd rather carry around 1 or 2 CD's with some of my albums on it, rather than carrying around a huge CD wallet with 30 seperate CD's. This player takes care of this problem easily! I like to have the least amount of loss in my compressed music as possible, so I rip all my CD's to 320kbps MP3, which the D-NE300 plays flawlessly. I can fit an average of 6-8 albums at this bitrate on a single 700MB CD-R. It's not made clear anywhere else, so I had to test it myself, and I'm confirming that this player supports both ID3v1 and ID3v2 tags. CD-Text also appears for CD's burned with CD-Text enabled. I've yet to buy a CD with CD-Text, but apparently some retail CD's have it. My only gripe is how slow the dot-matrix screen scrolls. I figured there'd be an option for the speed, but there isn't.

Some people have already pointed out the cons of Atrac3/Atrac3plus and the supplied SonicStage software. I haven't tested it too much though. I made one Atrac3plus CD encoded at 256kbps. The sound is great, but it took almost 2 hours to convert 56 songs from 320kbps MP3. That's way too long for me to wait! I'll stick with MP3, thank you very much. It's much more universal, and not as much of a pain in the ass. Also, the seamless option for Atrac3 doesn't work. There's always at least 2-3 seconds between tracks.

One feature I've been playing around with a lot is the parametric equalizer. I like my music to sound perfect, and this option keeps me satisfied. I use Active the most (best for pop/rock), but sometimes I'll use Soft for slower acoustic numbers, or Heavy, obviously for faster, heavier music. Custom is fun to play around with, especially when listening to concert recordings.

Pros: Light-weight, compact size, great sound, flawless MP3 support.

Cons: poor software, no remote, no backlit LCD

Overall: Highly recommended. I am completely satisfied with this product, and would recommend it to anyone who's considering it. If you want radio as well, spend the extra few bucks for the D-NF400, which is the exact same player with AM/FM/TV/Weatherband support.