Sony CMT-NE5

This has a great sound for such a small unit, and it's great looking.

It fits well into an office, bedroom or most anywhere one wants

a stereo. All in all, this system is a great value for the price.

The first impressions of the Sony CMT-NE5 you get from this is the weight. It feels very heavy. This is due to the high build quality of the system. It is made of wood and metal throughout and has a very chunky feel to it. When you get it set up, which is a very simple procedure you can really appreciate its greatness. It comes with around 6 feet speaker cable per speaker so you can get a very powerful stereo effect. With 66W of power there is easily enough to go very loud (I've never hed the need to go above half way) but also it can produce very delicate sounds. The system is easy to use, with the remote control controlling everything. One thing that impressed me was the facility to hook up external equipment using some RCA leads. This lets you attach your MP3 player for example to the system and listen to it in full stereo. The radio data service, RDS is excellent and tells you what station you are listening to, and the CD playback is great. MP� playback is a treat; you can put many albums on a CD and navigate through them easily, and the system will tell you the album and song titles, much like a portable hifi all in all, it is a great, value for money package that I would recommend to anyone. It has 2 minor drawbacks; the sometimes long access times for MP3 playback, and the noticeable sound of the disc spinning, when listening at low volumes, but these can be expected from all MP3 CD players.

After my bad experiences with another Sony hi-fi (and I use that term cautiously) I was slightly dubious about getting the CMT-NE5. Sony offered it as a replacement to a CMP30 which had packed in after just 18 months of light usage. I haggled to get it for a knock down price of £35 so it would probably be a bit cheeky of me to grumble about it! It normally retails for around £129 in the likes of Currys.

First off, it looks neat and compact and the distinct whiff of wood leads me to believe they've used a real wood veneer on the the speakers. Quality touch. The sound, all round, is reasonably good for a machine of this price but don't expect miracles. There's no equalizer to shape the sound only two buttons for an inadequate choice of bass and treble settings; they only go up to '3'. There is, however, a button for a setting that's grandly called 'Dynamic Sound Generator X-tra'. My advice is to keep this switched on as without it the sound is weak and lacks 'poke'. Why they simply didn't just incorporate this as an integral part of the amp is beyond me; it's probably another selling gimmick. The best thing about the CMT-NE5 is that it plays MP3's and the display is fairly informative as to what artist and track is playing.

Generally speaking, this is a competent and pleasant sounding micro-system that would be happy in the bedroom or office. For serious listening, however, I think it's lacking as at even at a healthy 20W RMS per channel output it's still sounds underpowered.