Sony PSYC D-NE320PSBLK Personal CD Player
- CD-R/CD-RW Playback: CD-R/CD-RW
- Bass Boost: With Bass Boost
- Anti Skip Buffer: G-Protection By Sony
- Supported Formats: MP3
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Smarter than Diskless MP3 players
Pros
Cheaper than Hard Drive players. Reliable. Great battery life.
Cons
Bigger than HD players. You need to make MP3 CDs.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Recommended. CD/MP3 is more economical, plays a wider range of bit-rate and is more reliable that hard-drive MP3 players.
I was in the market for a 30-60 gigabyte hard-drive MP3
player. I had been using my inexpensive iRiver imp50 CD/MP3
player for a couple of years and have had no problems. I work in a noisy place however, and the volume on the iRiver is quite low and it eats batteries quickly, so I started
shopping for an iPod, or a Zen Touch, or some other Hard Drive player. I found that all HD players, no matter the manufacturer, had problems, i.e. 1. Can't play low bit-rates (voice, lectures, sermons, some low-encoded audiobooks, etc.), 2. Drive goes out of alignment, 3. Integrated-into-the-unit batteries cannot be replaced.
There are other problems with CD-less players as well.
I decided to stay with CD/MP3. I have hundreds of disks that I can play and blank disks are still cheap if I need more media. I decided to buy the Sony DNE320PSBLK because it plays bit-rates down to 8 bit, like the iRiver, the volume is higher, and the battery (it only takes one 'AA') lasts over 40 hours. That's pretty good. I won't have to use my adapter as much as I did with the old iRiver, making this unit more portable. I searched iRiver for an upgraded unit, but they no longer manufacture CD/MP3 players. 'Why get a HD player', I thought. I can get a good 9-10 hours of music on a CD with MP3. It's a little bigger than an HD, sure, but Case Logic makes a nice case for it and it also has a remote so I won't have to fiddle with the main unit, a negative on the old iRiver imp50 that didn't have a remote. I wanted something smaller, but the disadvantages of an HD player outweighed the advantages. If they go bad you are out a lot of money. This is 1/6th the cost of an HD.
If they made a DVD/MP3 disk player, that would be better because you'd have nearly 5 Gigs per disk, but I'm sure the geeks don't have anything like that in mind. You wouldn't need HD at all! You could have 94 Gigs on 20 disks. That's probably anybody's whole music collection. With Blu-Ray
or holographic disk players you would be approaching total musical saturation.
I still think CD/MP3 is a much smarter buy at this stage of development than much more expensive and unreliable HD players and I will wait until they make HD players more versatile (lower bit rates for voice) and more reliable with better battery options. Who needs a $400 paperweight?
I don't. This thing is reliable and easy to replace if I break it. $50-$60 bucks is easier than $400 a pop.
player. I had been using my inexpensive iRiver imp50 CD/MP3
player for a couple of years and have had no problems. I work in a noisy place however, and the volume on the iRiver is quite low and it eats batteries quickly, so I started
shopping for an iPod, or a Zen Touch, or some other Hard Drive player. I found that all HD players, no matter the manufacturer, had problems, i.e. 1. Can't play low bit-rates (voice, lectures, sermons, some low-encoded audiobooks, etc.), 2. Drive goes out of alignment, 3. Integrated-into-the-unit batteries cannot be replaced.
There are other problems with CD-less players as well.
I decided to stay with CD/MP3. I have hundreds of disks that I can play and blank disks are still cheap if I need more media. I decided to buy the Sony DNE320PSBLK because it plays bit-rates down to 8 bit, like the iRiver, the volume is higher, and the battery (it only takes one 'AA') lasts over 40 hours. That's pretty good. I won't have to use my adapter as much as I did with the old iRiver, making this unit more portable. I searched iRiver for an upgraded unit, but they no longer manufacture CD/MP3 players. 'Why get a HD player', I thought. I can get a good 9-10 hours of music on a CD with MP3. It's a little bigger than an HD, sure, but Case Logic makes a nice case for it and it also has a remote so I won't have to fiddle with the main unit, a negative on the old iRiver imp50 that didn't have a remote. I wanted something smaller, but the disadvantages of an HD player outweighed the advantages. If they go bad you are out a lot of money. This is 1/6th the cost of an HD.
If they made a DVD/MP3 disk player, that would be better because you'd have nearly 5 Gigs per disk, but I'm sure the geeks don't have anything like that in mind. You wouldn't need HD at all! You could have 94 Gigs on 20 disks. That's probably anybody's whole music collection. With Blu-Ray
or holographic disk players you would be approaching total musical saturation.
I still think CD/MP3 is a much smarter buy at this stage of development than much more expensive and unreliable HD players and I will wait until they make HD players more versatile (lower bit rates for voice) and more reliable with better battery options. Who needs a $400 paperweight?
I don't. This thing is reliable and easy to replace if I break it. $50-$60 bucks is easier than $400 a pop.
