Sony CDP-CX235 200-Disc CD Changer

My old CD player was a 5-disc changer, another Sony product. It sounded a little bright and harsh on some music, particularly at higher volumes, but that's not uncommon with CDs and it went pretty well with the rest of my system so I was quite happy with it.

Then came Best Buy. I should know better than to go anywhere near this store - they always have stuff I decide I want, but there I was, wandering around their small selection of Hi-Fi components, when an open box CDP-CX235 caught my eye. $145 for easy access to every CD I own? Could I turn it down? SHOULD I turn it down? Well I probably should have, but I couldn't.

The CX235 carries up to 200 CDs, has titling and grouping features to make location of any disc relatively quick and easy, carries an optical output for connection to mini-disc or CD recorder, and has the usual bunch of shuffle/repeat/program features that modern players just can't do without. I also comes with a remote.

And then the first thing you notice about it when you get it home is that it's much bigger than it looks in the store. Positively bulky in fact. That was the first thing that surprised me. The second was that it took absolutely ages to put all my CDs in it and give them titles. Newer models can take text input from a PC keyboard, but the CX235 can't, so you can expect to take a long time over the loading of discs. That's my first real complaint about this unit... it's designed to carry a pretty extensive collection of music, but whoever designed it obviously wasn't going to have to load one for himself.

And there's another thing. While the method for adding titles is fairly simple, there's a maximum of 16 characters to play with for each. No scrolling. So titles have to be very brief and that means sometimes very unhelpful when searching for a disc. Only a minor complaint - and given the lack of keyboard entry probably just as well!

So, loaded up and ready to play, the CX235 has another surprise. It's slow. Getting to the disc you want is fast but loading it ready to play is not. It whirrs, it clicks and it whirrs some more and then the disc is ready. Faster than locating the disc you want in a stack on the floor.... but only just.

And one more thing before I get to the point about what it sounds like - getting discs out again if you want to play them in the car or somewhere else in the house. I was so busy thinking how cool it would be to have every disc in one player for easy access that I hadn't thought of that - but you most certainly should. It isn't that discs are hard to find once they're loaded in there. In fact all you do is spin the tray until the title you want is displayed, then open the door and it's the one right in front of you. But there's no way to get it out without gripping on the edge, front and back, and lifting it out. Maybe fingerprints on CDs aren't bad news, but this is fiddly and awkward. Plus it's wise to remember which slot it was in so you can put it back later, because once out of the player the title won't display again to show you where to load it back because the disc is no longer there. Of course, once you HAVE put it back, the title reappears. And that's another thing worth remembering - the titles are held in memory according to the slot not the disc, so if you move discs about you'll have to erase the entry and put it in the new location manually.

Of course, I should say that if you have CDs that conform to the 'CD text' standard you don't have to enter any title or bother what slot it's in, because the player will read the text and show it in the display. Much, much easier, but at present discs with text on them are few and far between.

Anyway, once loaded up what does it sound like? If it was anything like the 5-disc changer I had before I'd have put it back in it's box and asked for a refund, because the fiddling necessary to handle 200 discs in one go would just not have been worth it. But it didn't sound like that at all. In fact this player is unquestionably among the very best I ever listened to, including expensive, esoteric units on sale for a great deal more.

The sound is fast, hard and incredibly detailed. It is powerful and sharp, yet not for a moment do you get any sense of brightness or boominess or any tonal imbalance. You hear effortlessly delivered music that carries dynamics and impact yet also has great subtlety and depth. It sounds natural, smooth and totally at home with anything you'll ever play in it. This player is entertaining. Very entertaining.

Sony CD players in the last couple of years or have been developing a reputation for being among the better of the best, and the CX235 is certainly in that category. For the fiddly, slow and limited titling capabilities and the densely packed carousel that makes removing individual discs for use in the car an awkward process you would much rather avoid, I'd score this unit a resounding 1 or 2 out of ten, but for it's ability to hold 200 discs and give outstanding musical performance on each and every one, it gets top marks and I'll put up with the annoyances quite happily.

I remember the first CD players back in.... well, a long time ago. It was hard to imagine taking them seriously as a way to listen to music. Even the latest generation of players tend to sound clinical and leave you little room to ignore the fact you're hearing digital systems with error correction and (if you're lucky) a bit of fuzzy logic. But the Sony CX235 is simply different - and exceedingly good.