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“I ordered this machine as a growing CD collection was...”

written by DMcAdams on 26/01/2004

Good Points
Great Sound Quality. Very quick to use. Instant access to 40,000 songs! Stylish looks. Cheap.

Bad Points
Slight minor flaws in interface.

General Comments
I ordered this machine as a growing CD collection was threatening to take over my room. Worse still, my laziness and the hundreds of CDs that liked to shuffle themselves around made it virtually impossible to find anything so a quick surf on the net found it for 50% of the Sony Shop's price and it was ordered.



I had my doubts about the quality of the sound before hearing it but a quick connection via optical cables to my system laid my fears to rest. CDs played on the machine sound virtually as good as my Marantz Special Edition CD player did, although a few recordings like Joe Jackson's "Body and Soul" show that it does fall slightly short. Generally the dynamics seem less explosive and the sound gets slightly confused and glassy on complex passages. However, I'm being very critical here - yes, I can hear it if I listen for it (although none of my friends can) but I can sit and enjoy music on it very happily indeed.



The actual machine is a pleasure to use. Sony seem finally to have brought their technological know-how together with some common sense. Not every one, in fact, virtually no one wants to write a small program in VB just play a CD or record an album. Users want something logical, quick and simple to use and this machine is the closest thing to it! Drop a CD in the slot and you can set it recording in seconds with a matter of a couple of button pushes. Tracks are automatically copied into a new folder and all the tracks are given the CD TEXT titles if it is present on the disk. However, since we know that CD makers find it impossible to use CD TEXT, (my entire collection has about less than 1% with CD TEXT on) Sony have provided a simple method that works very well. Link the CD player to your computer via the USB cable, (provided) and it will grab the information of the net for you in seconds. I've put on about 260 CDs so far and not had to type anything at all. You can then pick music via Artist, song title or album title. You can even search for a keyword so "Love" would bring up "Love Bites", "I Love You Porgy", "I Want To Know What Love Is" and about 80 other song titles! One word of warning - a search for "love" would find nothing because the machine is not intelligent enough to decide that "Love" and "love" are the same thing and I just want to play music, not enter into a case sensitive search!



You can record in PCM format, (basically a direct copy of the CD with no compression) which allows you to record 125hrs worth of music. This has the advantage of recording at 12x speed, meaning the average album takes about 5mins to record.



You can also record in Atrac3 which compresses the music, allowing you to fit about 1340 hrs on the machine, although it will only record at 3x speed. There is a slight loss in sound quality as I described above but we are talking very slight. The sound I have is still very detailed and crisp with wonderful bass that is very deep and full without becoming muddled.



You can also transfer MP3s from a PC, record from an analogue source and even convert songs/albums in PCM format to Atrac3 should you need extra space, (that would be some record collection!)



The machine will work via optical cables, (I linked it via optical cables and allowed my amp to take over the digital conversion which brought a slight improvement to the sound) standard phono leads and a USB cable. It makes virtually no sound when you play music - from my seat which is 2m from it I cannot hear it at all. A few disks in my collection have made a loud vibrating noise when being copied at 12x speed but have played perfectly, (and with no noise from the CD player) when safely on the hard drive.



The machine will not allow you to make a digital copy of a copy but then almost all machines have to adhere to this "feature". At the end of the day you can always grab the original CD and make a fresh copy if you really need to but an analogue copy is more than good enough for the car; and if you don't have the original CD to use then you can't really complain can you? It will also delete the original MP3 file from your computer if you copy them across but then it's not too hard to make an extra copy yourself before sending them to the Sony Hard Drive - it even deletes the copy for you and leaves your original file nice and safe!



You can rename, move around, join and split files that you have recorded, much the same as Mini Disk allows you to. This process can take perhaps 30 seconds or so. It is just a shame the software is not intelligent enough to allow you to queue up operations. For example, if I want to join 10 tracks together you have to link track 1 to 2, then track 1 to 3, then track 1 to 4 and after waking myself up, continue the process. I would prefer to simple tell the machine to link them all together and then go make a cup of tea - after all, I think a computer can remember a small sequence of instructions like that.



Overall, this machine is fantastic and I would recommend it fully. Great sound, instant access to tens of thousands of songs and the benefit of never having to hunt across shelf after shelf for a CD is fantastic. It will remember the last 10 albums you have played or allow you to set up playlists that span any number of albums or artists to create your own compilations for any mood. There are many little features that make it simple to use that I keep finding. My only caveat is although this is by far and away Sony's best interface to date, they still haven't got it right. Who on earth sat down at Sony and decided that "Wild Wood", "WILD WOOD" and "wild wood" are different songs? Not in my collection Sony. Oh, and why spoil an excellent display by always showing CD or HD on the same line as the song title when a small led on the unit tells you the same thing. This just takes up space and from a distance of more than 5cm blends in with the title anyone fancy a burst of "HDWild Wood"? Now if I can just type in the correct name