Sony CD / MP3 player

Once upon a time I had a car, and it had a radio that didn't work and a cassette player that did. So I used to tape my CD's onto cassettes to listen to in the car. This wasn't ideal, after all a tape only plays for a relatively short time before it needs turning over, but that was all I had.

Then I saw an advert in the paper for the Sony D-NE518CK , a CD/mp3 player which came with a car kit that simply went into the cassette slot and you could get upto 30 hours of music one disc. My mouth dropped and I said “WOW, I've got to get one of them!!!”.So off I toddled to Argos and bought the CD Walkman for a princely £90, then as a nice bonus received a free 240 disc case and 5 CD-A (writeable CDs that can only be used like regular audio CDs).

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  In the box
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Inside the rather large and very stylish silver box I found:The CD Walkman
Earbud earphones
AC power adapter
Car battery adapter
Car connecting kit
Remote control
CD-ROM containing Simple Burner software.
Instruction manuals for both the player and the software.

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  The Software
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The simple burner software was very easy to install on my computer, simply put it in my drive and accessed it through my computer (I have auto-run disabled, but if you have it enabled the installation will begin automatically)And the software was indeed easy to use, I had to simply click and drag music files into the window ready to be converted, however these converted files cannot be played on anything other than a Sony atrac system (not even the computer), and as such I found them pretty useless as I like to use my discs in other mp3 compatible players.

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  The Player
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As one would expect from Sony the player is very stylish and sturdy. The sound quality was also excellent. I have so far used audio CDs, mp3 CDs, atrac CDs and CDs containing a mix of mp3 and atrac. All have played superbly with no skipping or stuttering.There is a nice little LCD display at the front which displays track number, and if using id tags with your mp3s will display the name of the track and artist.

There are several playback options including:
Playing all tracks in a random order (shuffle play)
Playing all files in a selected group in random order (Group shuffle play)
Playing by bookmarks (like favourites)
Playing by playlist (you know those lists you create in winamp).
Of course you can also play a disc from start to finish.

The is also G-protection available to help prevent skipping caused by movement, along with a hold switch which prevents the controls being accidentally activated.

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  Car Adapter Kit
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It is very simple to plug the cassette adapter into the Walkman, along with the remote control and car battery adapter. The cassette adapter then slid nicely into the cassette slot in the car. However, the supplied pieces of Velcro weren't actually any good at holding the CD player in place, so mine ended up sitting on the floor in the front passenger side.
The remote control was a nice touch which allowed me to skip tracks easily while still driving.
Obviously if your speakers aren't up to much (as mine) then the sound quality won't be amazingly good in the car, but it was better than with a cassette.

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  Battery Life
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Now this was absolutely amazing. My children's cheaper players go through a set of batteries in a day. But I took this player on holiday with me, used it for the whole train journey there and back (about 6hours), plus for a couple of hours each night and the batteries were still going strong. I reckon I'm getting about 20+ hours life from a set of cheap batteries.

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  Other Information
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I purchased this Walkman from Argos for £90 just over a year ago. However, a quick search on the net shows that this model is now discontinued.

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  Final Words
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An improvement that could have been made to this player is a belt clip or similar, as it is too large to slip into a pocket.However this is a great player, that puts cheaper makes to shame. Although it now appears unavailable in major retailers, if you find it on ebay or similar I can only say go for it, you won't be disappointed.