Sony Walkman D-E206CK Personal CD Player

The Discman, the Discman, I?ll take the Discman!

After ditching the Audiophase (see Round 1!), I didn?t want to hop right into another portable CD player ? fuggly hates disappointment. I sent the confound Audiophase back to Best Buy and took the refund price and sat on it. And sat on it. And sat on it. Finally, after months ? Months, mind you! ? of deliberation and stress-filled shopping excursions back to Best Buy, I bought the next-to-cheapest portable CD player I could find.

Lo and behold, be-darned if it weren?t a Discman! (Note here that, though most of the previous sentence is a grammatical hodge-podge, the use of ?were? is correct in the conditional sense following ?if.? This sentence is, therefore, intentionally screwed ? fuggly knows how to write right, even if he don?t always do it . . .)

Yes, you heard (read?) me right: the next cheapest player (with a car kit) at Best Buy was a Sony Discman. And we all know that fuggly secretly wanted a Discman all along. So I payed an extra $20 for the Discman, for a total price of $59.95 -- $40 below MSRP. Now, I thought, even if the blamed thing won?t play the brother-in-law and even if it encourages NIN screeching and howling to continue unabated, at least fuggly will look cool.

So I took the Discman home, propped it up (still in the impossible-to-penetrate, nuclear-proof, molded plastic ?box?) next to my desk, and stared at it. For two weeks. I was afraid to open it, afraid it would be a severe disappointment. And my fear was multifaceted: one the one hand, I was afraid of never hearing the Mavericks without multiple intermissions, on the other hand, I was afraid the Discman WOULD play the brother-in-law ? I might be forced to listen to that garbage! I refused to open the box until I was sure the CDR with the blue front (back?) was not-so-safely tucked somewhere I might never find it (intact, at least).

When I did open the package (finally, after literally hours of trying, two knives, a pair of scissors, and a permanent scar on my right palm), I found the Discman ready to play. It came with a short, simple set of instructions which I promptly threw out. Right away I noticed that the Discman didn?t have a volume wheel; it had buttons, cute buttons, too. And it had a little Mega Bass switch which I promptly turned on. I popped in The Fragile and listened to my favorite NIN tune of the moment: ?Starf*&%ers.? The sound was awesome. Better than awesome. It was AWEsome. And loud, too. I knew right away that I could listen to this CD player in my antique Ford.

I went right out, hoped in the Jeep, plugged in car kit, and tossed on some Kenny Rogers. Immediately I noticed the display: it listed the count of the song. I ticked off ?The Gambler? and played with the buttons on the top of the player just to see what would happen. I found out that though the player prefers to play at zero volume when using the car kit, you can turn up the volume control and use Kenny to blow out your factory Jeep speakers. As you adjust the volume, it increases by small increments and by large numbers ? each number has a small increment bar beside it which shows how much of that number you?ve given up to the volume daemon. I was so proud to be going deaf listening to ?Ruby, Don?t Take Your Love to Town.?

Another button beneath the volume buttons said menu. I started pressing it just to see what would happen and I noticed that the display window started showing those little funky icons which denote when you have Repeat play or Continuous play. The Audiophase had absolutely no such choices, but the Discman had them all: Repeat, Single-track, Repeat-single, and Repeat-shuffle. I almost peed in my pants.

So there fuggly was: powering down the road on, blaring out ?The Coward of the County? on Repeat-single play with the Mega Bass just a?booming. And fuggly looked cool (almost ? in bad light ? very bad light). In addition, fuggly sounded cool.

But there was one more test: the railroad tracks. I leveled the Jeep off at 60mph (don?t try this at home) and hit those tracks: Boom! Nothing but air. Even amidst the screeching of the tires and the clawing of fuggly?s passenger, the Discman could be heard to play right on. Absolutely no skipping. No intermissions. No nothing. (After a few weeks of amazement at the lack of intermissions, fuggly visited the Sony web page and discovered that they use a special extract of bat wing and hollow bird-bones ground very fine in order to prevent the skipping. They call this feature ESP2, and they brag quite a lot about it; but the bragging is well deserved.)

Beyond the batwing extract, the Discman has a couple of other useful features: a Hold switch prevents unwanted cute-button pushing while you?re driving down the road ? with this switch, you are always in control of the radio (unless your passenger finds the switch, in which case you just have to kill her. . .). The Discman also comes with a cord catcher, a hollow plastic tube cut in a spiral which allows you to run your power adapter cord and your tape deck cord together to keep them as out of the way as possible. I made a lot of fun of the cord catcher before I used it; now I sleep with it wrapped snuggly around me every night.

?But surely there were some bad things about the player,? you say. ?You jest,? I reply.

Well, there are a couple of less-than-perfect things. For one, there is still no light in the display; I do lots of night driving, and I could really use a light in order to keep from killing those nice people coming at me in the opposite lane. For another less-than-perfect (actually quite irritating) thing, whenever you hit the button to change tracks, the player emits a high-pitched, ear-shattering beep. I hate beeps. Beeps annoy me. They remind me of people. But the really good thing about the Sony D-E206CK was that it looked a lot like a Sony Discman from ten feet away. And from five feet. And ten inches. Five inches. An inch. People thought I was cool with my new Discman. People are easily fooled.